Best Laptop for Sonar?

IMO the best laptops are made by IBM and Toshiba. I've never used a laptop as a DAW but I don't see why these wouldn't be excellent choices.

Just my two cents...

Interesting. . . I did a lot of checking on floating-point performance and what was not being said about HT and the P4 from cakewalk.
I ended up buying an Athlon eMachines notebook (1.8G clock, 2.4G chip) and I really have to load up a bunch of channels compressors and EQs along with DxIs to get anywhere near 50% processor use.
I hadn't heard about the centrinos being any better - any word about how they stack up against the Athlon?

(The deal with the Athlon is it has 3 floating point units - they got bad press on the K6 and K7 so did overkill to try to beat Intel - works in favor of DAW users)

The one thing about a low end notebook - actually just about all of the off-the shelf ones it the hard drive. This notebook came with a 4200rpm drive and I can reliably play back only about 20 channels at 48/16. I'm dyin' to put in one of those 60G 7200 rpm drives, but the price keeps dropping so I wait. . .

IMO the best laptops are made by IBM and Toshiba. I've never used a laptop as a DAW but I don't see why these wouldn't be excellent choices.

My notebook is a Toshiba satellite with an 850MHZ processor that I bought in July 2000. Nothing remarkable in that, you may think, apart from the fact that it's given 3.5 years of trouble free service (touch wood), at least 12 hours a day running. It's survived being in a bag on my back when I crashed my motorbike. And it's still running the same installation of W2K that I put on it when I bought it -albeit with all the latest patches.

This is one tough machine.

I seriously doubt whether any of the lightweight Compaqs or cheapo brands would be able to offer this performance.

ORIGINAL: Paul Russell

My notebook is a Toshiba satellite

This is one tough machine.

Glad to hear it! I'm writing this message on my new 3.0 GHz HT Satellite laptop machine using my wireles accesspoint. I bet it would run circles around my 1.3 GHz Athlon DAW when running SONAR. I'm almost afraid to even try it since I'd start thinking about upgrading the DAW...

I have owned a bunch of laptops over the years. It's not so much the 'best laptop for Sonar' as 'best laptop' (I currently run Sonar 2.2 on an HP Omnibook 6000 PIII 850).

If getting it fixed when it breaks is important, even several years after it was made, then buy IBM. Their service and support is superior in every way. They keep parts for old machines. They have a worldwide presence and an excellent web site with all drivers etc. available. Also IBMs have the best keyboards in the business with decent key travel.

Other brands which in my experience have been reliable and have decent support are HP/Compaq and Toshiba. Of these, I would probably lean towards Toshiba.

I would strongly NOT recommend any 'off brand' laptops. The problem here is after-sales support and service. If it breaks, your chances of getting it fixed in a timely manner are not good. I include Dell in this list. In two previous jobs I've seen little stacks of defective Dell laptops quietly piling up in the corner of the IT department.

Sony have gained a reputation for inadequate support and there have been complaints that drivers have been missing from their web site. Also Sony keyboards have a very shallow key travel and if you are doing any typing you may dislike this.

The Athlon processor has superior floating point performance to the Pentium, but poorer power management. If you are going to be permanently connected to mains power, this may not be an issue - but check that the laptop fan, when on, is sufficiently quiet. My HP Omnibook has a very noisy fan, for instance, that kicks in randomly, and distractingly. Not too big a deal as I mainly put down MIDI stuff, but if you were recording a vocalist or something you would find this a real problem.

[you do need to disable all power management, pretty much, if you don't want random dropouts. In particular, watch your power schemes - 'max battery' in particular, throttles your CPU back very heavily. Also be aware that quite a few 'fast' laptops actually throttle back when running on battery - and this can't be disabled. There is a useful Intel CPU speed utility you can download to check whether this is happening - these are things best sorted in the shop rather than found out after you get home]

I have had quite good success adding an external USB2 drive to my laptop and splitting hard disk access across the internal (4200rpm) drive and the external Lacie 80G 7200rpm drive. I measured disk & CPU utilisation at 60% playing 16 tracks of 44.1KHz audio on my PIII 850 laptop either using the internal drive or the external USB2 drive. Since these external drives are very cheap, this is worth considering rather than upgrading an internal laptop drive. (and the external drives are VERY VERY quiet, BTW).

Clearly for sound you are going to need an external USB device or a PCMCIA card. But be careful. If you need more USB ports a PCMCIA USB card will probably block both slots (a couple of brands don't but most do), so your choice will be important. Don't even think about using the laptop's internal sound and DON'T install the sound drivers for it (this has caused me grief in the past).

I have the Edirol UA20 but if I were starting again I'd look seriously at the Tascam unit which appears to offer quite a bit more for not a lot more money. This is of course just stereo in/out. More ports and you're looking at USB2 (there is a multiport cheap USB1 device floating around but apparently driver issues are a big deal, be careful). Or you could add firewire via PCMCIA (or buy a laptop that has built-in Firewire). But either of these are still quite 'leading edge' so if you plan on 16 inputs or something, I don't think a laptop is a wise decision.

If you are going to upgrade memory for your laptop, do it when you buy the laptop. Laptops can be very picky about the brand of memory chips they will work with; for example, my Omnibook requires CL2 100MHz SDRAM but all attempts to upgrade it beyond 384M have failed; it will not work reliably with 2 X 256M Kingston DIMMs in there, for instance. So have the vendor supply the memory and then everything will kick off with the standard warranty.

Finally, although you will probably be buying a laptop with internal USB2 support check that the NEC chipset is used. Other chipsets e.g Ali, have real problems. This also applies if you want to add a PCMCIA USB2 card. It must use the NEC chipset. (Belkin make a cheap but quite functional card that comes with an external AC adaptor to allow USB-powered devices to be supported)

If I had a choice of operating system, I'd strip out XP and put Win2K on. XP contains far too many 'bells and whistles' that you must systematically disable in order to ensure that audio applications aren't disrupted. With Win2K you need only disable a dozen or so useless services and you can get the OS footprint down to around 45M memory and ensure things don't kick in during that vital take.

(but remember all laptops etc these days come with a useless 'product recovery disk' which means doing any kind of reinstall is a right pain - if you are wise, you will partition your hard disk and then set up a completely separate OS install for music use. DON'T surf the web or do word processing from your music partition. DON'T install anything you don't need. I learned this lesson the hard way. Keeping an audio system stable requires being ruthless about NOT installing software and keeping careful track of what you did install, so that if it becomes unstable you can back out without a reinstall. )

Therefore you might want to budget for a copy of a 'proper' Windows disk that you can install without all that product recovery malarkey, or maybe you can do a deal with the vendor on this one. Also 'partition magic' might be worth looking into if you want to repartition your system at some point without starting from scratch. Just DON'T put everything on drive C:.... you'll regret it....

Finally, check the screen on the laptop in the shop. If there are any stuck pixels, now is the time to reject it (when I bought the Omnibook, I sifted through five machines, all of which had at least one stuck pixel, in order to find one where the problem was least annoying.. this is still an issue with LCD screens, so check it out in the shop. Five or less defective pixels is not regarded as a warranty defect, so why not start out with a good screen in the first place.. generally, defects do not appear subsequently.

Oh, and one last thing. With flat screens being so cheap, and small form factor machines now becoming readily available, do you really need a laptop?. You're compromising a lot of things like bus speed and upgradeability, and paying a premium for it. If you aren't really going to be moving around a lot, would you be better off with a small form-factor PC (some of which are about the size of one of those little stereos) and a flat screen and keyboard (wireless, perhaps). This would be a lot more powerful and expandable.

Its 14' 1440x1050 display makes it both comfortable and small enough to take it with me on the train (this one does 600 kilometers a day!!)

Make sure you have a good backup regime. Even notebook hard disks are known to fail when given a good shaking everyday. 600K per day is a lot of vibration.

Sager, Clevo or ProStar (all of them are the same machine)

They are true desktop replacements, no shared memory video cards, 4 USB 2 ports, Firewire and a bunch of other features.

They are not cheap, but they are worth the money if you want to do serious mobile recording.

They use full sized chips and you can get them with a 800MHz FSB. They support up to 3 hard drives internally (you have to remove the TV tuner if you want to add the third HD), have a removable MP3 player and a gang of other options.

And you get a 16.1" display that will do 1600 x 1200.

I've read all the other post and while the "Big Boys" do make nice machines, none of them compare to one of these.

And you can get a 3 year warranty if you desire and that even includes the screen (almost $1000 replacement cost)

ORIGINAL: tommydee
...
using centrino chips are outperforming P4 desktop systems...

True, the Acer 1.7 GHz Centrino shows lower CPU load than a desktop 2.66 GHz P4. Could be the bigger cache, better design, or what ever. The result is, what counts. And yes, the centrinos have cooling fan noises happening only occasionally, normally cooling fans are off completely.

Hey - there was a lot of info in that post. . .

<more snips from aj>
> Since these external drives are very cheap, this is worth considering >rather than upgrading an internal laptop drive. (and the external drives >are VERY VERY quiet, BTW).

I've heard that the hitachi 60M is pretty quiet, but I also have an isolated live room, so not too critical. I also heard that the internal UDMA interface is much faster than going out firewire or USB.

>Clearly for sound you are going to need an external USB device or a >PCMCIA card.

Or get a laptop that has firewire - I love the Motu 828mkII runs without a hitch.

>apparently driver issues are a big deal, be careful). Or you could add >firewire via PCMCIA (or buy a laptop that has built-in Firewire). But either >of these are still quite 'leading edge' so if you plan on 16 inputs or >something, I don't think a laptop is a wise decision.

Didn't read far enough - I haven't tried 16 inputs, but 8 barely raises the processor load at fairly low latency settings.


>If I had a choice of operating system, I'd strip out XP and put Win2K on.

. . .

>DON'T surf the web or do word processing from your music partition. >DON'T install anything you don't need. I learned this lesson the hard way. >Keeping an audio system stable requires being ruthless about NOT >installing software and keeping careful track of what you did install, so >that if it becomes unstable you can back out without a reinstall. )

Yet another motivation to have a swappable HD at 7200.
I have every version of Win 2K from the development packs. . .
Stopped developing at Win ME, but my subscription kept going for a while.
I agree about no browser, no internet no nothing.
Seems like everything that is "consumer oriented" like the browsers, media players, whatever, installs a bunch of objects and services on the system that can slow it down.

Clean is critical. My music desktop has no browser, nothing but audio stuff on it. Runs clean. My work machine is a dog - debug dlls that can never be removed, objects and browser plugins all over the place. Yikes.

ORIGINAL: tommydee

Sager, Clevo or ProStar (all of them are the same machine)

They are true desktop replacements, no shared memory video cards, 4 USB 2 ports, Firewire and a bunch of other features.

URLs where you can find 'em?

http://www.sagernotebook.com/index.html
http://www.advanceddesignky.com/systems/Laptop.cfm

however the 16" have either a serious shortage or are discontinued..
i cant get a staight answer.. same thing is available in 15"

Scott
ADK

Hi!

I would like to ask user fortunechild a question about laptop he is using with Sonar:

Have you experienced problem with the sound latency when working with instrument (midi or audio) when monitoring computer’s soundcard output? If you have, would you know the solution to this problem?
I got eMachines M5305 (OS XP Home) and using Sonar 2.0XL as recording software. As control surface for recording midi or audio I’m using Tascam USB-428 (or midi keyboard directly to computer via USB). If monitoring recorded stuff thru sound module’s or Tascam’s output latency will not occur. Is there solution for avoiding latency created on soundcard?

Thank you!

Hey fortune,

ORIGINAL: fortunechild
I bought an Echo Indigo card to use when monitoring away from the desk (which uses a Motu 828mkII).

We made the same choices (MOTO 828mkII at the desk, Echo Ingigo when mobile). Nice combo, except I wish I could find an inexpensive super-compact preamp to go with the Indigo.

On the laptop side, I always loved Toshiba BUT I purchased a 5005-s504 from Toshiba about two years ago. It has a desktop processor and was inadequately cooled. Toshiba's "fix" was a BIOS change to slow the processor down to half speed most of the time (causing audio apps to suddenly click&pop all over the place) For 6 months, I switched out soundcards, etc before buying a desktop instead (thinking laptops weren't up to the job). Sadly, it was just this Toshiba model that wasn't. There is now a class-action lawsuit about this particular model.

I ended up with a Dell 5100, which is utterly boring compared to the Toshiba: terrible internal sound and speakers. BUT - the Dell works great with real audio hardware.

One of the other reasons I didn't chose Toshiba is they actually dropped Firewire from most of their models last year, which is bizzare because most toshiba owners already had a firewire investment. Looks like they re-added firewire this year.

Eric

quote:

I used this laptop (Toshiba 5005-s504) until recently. I had terrible music performance for the first year but then a bios update showed up on the Toshiba site without any fanfare that seemed to fix the problem and give it standard PIII performance.

I actually swapped the processor out on the 5005-s504 (to a celeron 1.4Ghz) and the machine is great now. But the slightly higher power draw apparently killed the battery pack. I'm afraid if I replace it it will just blow again, so now its just a portable desktop for my wife (the wives get all the old stuff).

Glad to here the P25 is nice. I don't know why they didn't put a full-size keyboard on that model (with numeric pad). Check out the HPs w/17" monitors to see what I mean.

Eric

ORIGINAL: wthrman
They are expensive..

that ain't no lie!

A google on Sager Notebooks might just surprise you.

Just be careful with Sager. The company I work for uses Sager's cause of the price being so nice. But, we've been burned before. Back when the newest machines were 1Ghz we got a 12 or more machines. All of them didn't work properly. Lot's of overheating issues.

With that said I am currently using an old 700Mhz Sager for programming applications and when I travel I use it to play around with Sonar 2.2XL. It works fine for what I'm doing.