stevesweat
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Minimum Laptop needed for tracking ONLY!
I want to get a laptop to record with my roland studio capture. All mixing etc will be done on PC. So I just need it to keep up with 12 simultaneous tracks. I'm thinking 6-8 gigs RAM. Any recommendations?
Thanks
Steve
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James Argo
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Re: Minimum Laptop needed for tracking ONLY!
2018/07/15 21:24:18
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Few things to consider when you tracking more than 8 tracks simultaeously:
1. Make sure you use SSD instead of HDD. In laptop, HDD is VERY slow, it will lag your system and gives you high latency issue.
2. Make sure the USB port used to connect audio interface is at least USB 2.0 , and not chainned with other USB devices.
I have never recorded 12 simultaneous audio tracks with laptop (I use PC for more than 4 simultaneous tracking), but even my old core2duo with 8GB DDR2 laptop can easily record 4 simultaneous 24 / 44.1 easily. So I bealieve any new processor (i5 and above) is not a problem.
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abacab
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Re: Minimum Laptop needed for tracking ONLY!
2018/07/15 21:30:31
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I would think any modern laptop should be quite capable of recording 12 tracks of audio, especially if you are not needing any real-time monitoring in the box, or any real-time FX during the tracking session.
The previous advice is very important, as most laptops come with slow spinning 5400RPM HDDs. If you are only going to get one internal drive, recommend opting for the largest SSD you can afford. Otherwise, if you can get a laptop with a 2nd internal drive bay, get that equipped with a large 7200RPM HDD for audio, and leave the 5400RPM drive for the system partition.
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msmcleod
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Re: Minimum Laptop needed for tracking ONLY!
2018/07/15 21:44:35
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James Argo
Few things to consider when you tracking more than 8 tracks simultaeously:
1. Make sure you use SSD instead of HDD. In laptop, HDD is VERY slow, it will lag your system and gives you high latency issue.
2. Make sure the USB port used to connect audio interface is at least USB 2.0 , and not chainned with other USB devices.
I have never recorded 12 simultaneous audio tracks with laptop (I use PC for more than 4 simultaneous tracking), but even my old core2duo with 8GB DDR2 laptop can easily record 4 simultaneous 24 / 44.1 easily. So I bealieve any new processor (i5 and above) is not a problem.
+1 to this. If all you're doing is tracking, then I/O bottlenecks are what you need to avoid. So (i) a fast hard disk (SSD), and (ii) A decent USB 2.0 interface, preferably with nothing else sharing it. For the USB side, check the specs of the laptop to see if the USB interfaces are separate or not. Most laptops offer more than one USB slot, but with some cheaper laptops these are basically a USB hub rather than separate ports. It might not be an issue, but you're better off with dedicated ports. CPU speed should not really be an issue. For what it's worth, back when I was using Pro Audio 7 and a Yamaha DSP Factory card, I could record 16 simultaneous tracks on a 166Mhz Pentium with 64MB of RAM on to an old IDE hard disk. Although it was a PCI card rather than USB, a USB 2.0 bus runs more than twice as fast as the CPU on that machine. When I upgraded to an Athlon 750Mhz and an extra DSP Factory card, I could comfortably record 24 simultaneous tracks (it struggled a bit with more than 24 tracks due to the hard disk speed, but it could do 32 tracks albeit a bit hit and miss). In saying that, I'd avoid Intel Atom based laptops. I've got an Atom based 1.6Ghz netbook that struggles with anything more than 2 tracks. My 2Ghz core duo however can cope with 8 tracks comfortably (I've not tried more).
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gswitz
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Re: Minimum Laptop needed for tracking ONLY!
2018/07/16 01:16:14
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I do this a lot with an old laptop.
It has a large hd 7200 rpm with some kind of front side cache.
I routinely record 16 tracks at 48k samples per second and the drive is never pushed above 2% write capacity as reported by rme digicheck.
Windows button + x... Presentation mode can help. I often turn on the laptop and record silence for some hours before the gig to make sure no windows tasks will get in the way during the show.
Windows updates can ruin things.
Using the laptop only for sessions once in a while means that all those windows tasks are hungry to trigger. I find it easier to leave the laptop on overnight the day before I need it than to disable tons of stuff that could matter.
I don't use sonar which stops recording at a dropout event. I use digicheck or ardour/mixbus on Linux Ubuntu studio. Both of these keep recording through machine issues and you can sort it out later.
Make sure to save between sets. Dupe copies of the recording at the show for the band. That way they will try themselves and appreciate your work all the more.
My laptop has 4 gb ram.
I can overheat it by running spectral analysers on all sixteen tracks while recording in the summer.
StudioCat > I use Windows 10 and Sonar Platinum. I have a touch screen. I make some videos. This one shows how to do a physical loopback on the RME UCX to get many more equalizer nodes.
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stevesweat
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Re: Minimum Laptop needed for tracking ONLY!
2018/07/16 02:02:39
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Thanks for your input, everybody!
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GaryMedia
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Re: Minimum Laptop needed for tracking ONLY!
2018/07/16 03:28:24
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☄ Helpfulby stevesweat 2018/07/16 13:05:18
I routinely record 32 mono tracks at 48k/24-bit with a Lenovo T400 laptop. It's a Core 2Duo at around 2.4GHZ.
The destination drive is a 7200 RPM 500GB Seagate drive in a caddy that replaced the DVD drive.
Capture software is Waves Tracks Live.
Audio interfaces have been Behringer X32 USB, Echo AudioFire FireWire, and Dante Virtual Soundcard. All successful.
CbB Win10 | Mac Pro 12-core 3.33GHz/48GB | TCL 55" 4K UHD | 480GB SSD | 6TB HDD RAID-5 array| 1.5TB SSD RAID-0 array | Midas M32 | 2x Audient ASP800 | UAD-2 Duo PCIe | Adam A7X. http://www.tedlandstudio.com/articles
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abacab
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Re: Minimum Laptop needed for tracking ONLY!
2018/07/16 14:00:33
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gswitz
I often turn on the laptop and record silence for some hours before the gig to make sure no windows tasks will get in the way during the show.
Windows updates can ruin things.
Using the laptop only for sessions once in a while means that all those windows tasks are hungry to trigger. I find it easier to leave the laptop on overnight the day before I need it than to disable tons of stuff that could matter.
All good advice here. Goes along with the general mainstream advice to always optimize your PC for audio by reducing or eliminating most startup and scheduled tasks. No need for extra tasks running in the background that may pop up and bite you in the middle of a recording session. Also make sure that you are running on AC power if possible and use the high performance power settings in Windows, by disabling all power saving and CPU throttling features.
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Jim Roseberry
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Re: Minimum Laptop needed for tracking ONLY!
2018/07/16 15:01:07
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☄ Helpfulby gswitz 2018/07/17 01:39:42
If you're just tracking audio, you can work at higher latency settings.
That makes the machine and configuration less critical.
Where the "wheels start to fall off" with most laptops is when you're trying to run heavy loads at smallest ASIO buffer sizes.
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gswitz
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Re: Minimum Laptop needed for tracking ONLY!
2018/07/17 01:40:31
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Jim Roseberry
If you're just tracking audio, you can work at higher latency settings.
That makes the machine and configuration less critical.
Where the "wheels start to fall off" with most laptops is when you're trying to run heavy loads at smallest ASIO buffer sizes.
What Jim says is true. When I'm recording out, the buffers are maxed out. Any routing to mains or monitors is through the interface only.
StudioCat > I use Windows 10 and Sonar Platinum. I have a touch screen. I make some videos. This one shows how to do a physical loopback on the RME UCX to get many more equalizer nodes.
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davdud101
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Re: Minimum Laptop needed for tracking ONLY!
2018/07/18 13:51:27
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SSD for tracking? Do you guys who do that use a small SSD and then transfer everything over to maybe a bigger HDD later (so that you only need maybe a 50gb SSD for example for a sort of manual cache and then a nice 2 or 3tb for long-term storage)? Or do you guys get multi-TB SSD's and keep everything stored there?
Could this method actually work for other types of high-volume flash storage like flash drives/SDHC card- and would it yield any speed benefits in the tracking phase for someone using a relatively powerful desktop computer that already does good low-latency tracking?
No intention to derail the topic, sorry for all the questions... I just find this possibility fascinating as I've got a lot of high-capacity memory cards and flash drives that I want to find some use for.
Mics: MXL 990, MXL R80, 2 x MXL Tempo XLRs, Cobalt Co9, SM48, iSK Starlight Cans: Hifiman HE4XX, AKG M220 Gear: Cakewalk BBL - PreSonus Firepod - Alesis Elevate 3 - Axiom 49 DAW: Win10, AMD FX-8300, 16GB DDR3
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Jim Roseberry
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Re: Minimum Laptop needed for tracking ONLY!
2018/07/18 15:30:28
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☄ Helpfulby abacab 2018/07/18 15:50:59
The thing to remember here "laptop" (using 2.5" drives). A 2.5" conventional HD isn't as fast as a 3.5" conventional HD. In this case (laptop), the advice to use SSD for tracking isn't that most folks really need a drive that sustains ~540MB/Sec for tracking... but rather it just maximizes performance in the 2.5" form-factor. If you're working with a desktop, you can use 3.5" conventional HDs. A single 3.5" conventional HD can sustain 100+ solid/contiguous 44.1k/48k tracks of audio. If you're working at high sample-rates (ie: 192k with dense projects), that's when you need SSD for tracking audio. To elaborate a bit more... Your drive needs to be able to keep up with the load. Having additional unused (un-needed) drive speed will not buy additional performance or allow working at lower latency. Scale your drives based on your needs: - Yes, you can put SSDs in RAID-0
- Yes, you can use M.2 Ultra (PCIe x4) SSDs that sustain 3400MB/Sec
If you're tracking at 44.1k... and your typical project is 24-48 tracks (not making heavy use of disk-streaming sample-libraries), you don't need to make things complicated/expensive. Dedicate a drive to "OS", another to "Audio", and a third to "Samples". Scale up from there... based on your specific needs. ie: If you're composing huge orchestral mock-ups for video games (needing 4000 notes of disk-streaming polyphony from multi-mic position sample-libraries), then you need "the works" as far as SSDs. Most folks don't need that level of performance.
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stevesweat
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Re: Minimum Laptop needed for tracking ONLY!
2018/07/18 20:26:16
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