12" Powerbooks, How about making music on 12" Powerbook? Options

[charlieb]

I have been waiting for a couple of months now to see what is best for me to buy in the Powerbook line. Making music is something I want to experiment with, it will not be my main thing to do.

I have been thinking of getting a 12" PB, and a 17" flat panel display.
60 Gigs hard drive, max Ram. Should this serve me well?
800 Firewire not a big deal?
Gigabit Ethernet not a big deal?

Thinking of buying Live, Reason, and Oxygen or Edirol, as was suggested.

As always, thanks in advance for your wisdom.

charlie

[raygun]

I think the 12" powerbook will serve you well. However, I strongly recommend that you take the 15" 1GHZ Superdrive into consideration. More money but I think you'll be happy with what you get. The bigger monitor, the faster processor, the level 3 cache which I think is quite a big deal, the ability to burn DVD:s for backup. 800 Firewire is not a big deal at this point but who knows what products this will open up for in the future! Gigabit ethernet is not a big deal at all unless you already have a gigabit powered computer that you'll network with. But then that is very nice!
I think the 15" is quite a lot more bang for the buck. In any way, your laptop will work great. Just make sure to max out the RAM and to run an external drive for audio!

Good luck!

[schoppito]

Hi
I´m also considering a 12 inch Powerbook. I would surely like something better but a budget has a limit. I wonder if the absence of an L3 cache would be an issue within a portable setup. Say, the 12 inch powerbook, an Mbox, and an external firewire harddrive. You can´t go over the Mbox´s limited simultaneous inputs, and they would be going to the external drive, so I don´t see how the powerbook wouldn´t be able to handle that. Then you would start adding tracks, plugins, and mixing. At what point of this process will no L3 cache become an issue? 4, 8, 16 tracks with as many plugins? more? What do you guys think?

[charlieb]

Hi Raygun,
Thanks for your input.

The 12" comes also with the Superdrive, and I was going to get a 17" flat panel display to go with it. So from what you write, that leaves me considering the importance of the L3 cache and the extra speed of the processor. Can you tell me how this impacts things?

The 15" once it comes out with the new case could be a good idea. With that I would not need to external display.

And also since I am not even a beginner yet, what is the importance of an external hard drive? Not just for storage since audio will take up a lot of space?

[rickenbacker]

Leave your Mac's hard drive to deal with the OS and the program you're using (SX, Logic, etc), while the external hard drive handles all your recording files. Also, get a 7,200rpm FireWire drive - most internal laptop hard drives are only 5,400, which isn't fast enough.

From other posts here, I wonder if you'll only be using Reason for the moment, so your files will be a lot smaller than if you were recording audio. Still, it's worth getting an external drive and setting up your system right from the start.

Do you need an extra 17" monitor, though? Surely the price of that on top of a 12" PowerBook would take you past the cost of the 15" PowerBook? Even though there's now the fantastically gorgeous and highly desirable 17" PowerBook, the 15" one is still plenty of screen.

Schoppito: for what it's worth, I use a 600MHz G3 iBook to record. I can get around 16 tracks of audio (some stereo) and a few more Midi, plus a couple of plug-ins on most tracks before I hit too many problems. With a G4 867MHz+, this should be well within your reach.

[charlieb]

Hi Rickenbacker,
I posted a reply to you but it got lost in cyberspace I think!

So for now, I will just say, thanks for the info.

Regards,
charlie