New Laptop recommendations sought

Rain Live book studio.....  Love mine!!!  It'll run anything my desktop can!!  There customer service is top too.  Comes tweaked for audio, they'll even pre-install your software if ya want. 

Sidenote: 
X1 stinks though, stay with 8.53 till March of 2012 when X2b might be stable and more thought out ...

not to steer you clear of an asus.but my guitarist got one and it haooen to be horrible.there very economical. but his was a nightmare from get go.returned it and got an hp. now hes in love..myself i have a toshiba.and it runs better than anything.three toshibas in my house.and my other back up is a dell and hp.i use one to down load one to scan test and the toshiba is my daw.not every asus is bad im sure..just make sure you know what your getting

JustGotPaid


I'm considering getting a new laptop to run Sonar X1. I have Sonar 8.5.3 on an older desk top, and it works fine, but the X1 recommendations indicate that this old machine won't run it.
 
I'd like a 15.4 or a 17.3 size laptop, but more importantly an i7 with 8 gb of ram and 750 - 1 TB. One I am looking at is the  ASUS - Laptop / Intel® Core™ i7 Processor / 17.3" Display / 8GB Memory / 750GB Hard Drive - Black
 
Question One, is anyone here using that laptop with X1, and/or could anyone offer info on how well it would work together. If this is not a good match, I'd appreciate other recommendations.
 
Question Two, I have the Sonar 8.5.3 upgrade on the old machine. The old machine won't run Sonar X1. If I get a new laptop can I get the $99 upgrade and put it on the new laptop?
 
Thank you for any suggestions.
 
Don

The X1 recommendations aren't telling you a machine won't run X1, they're telling you Cakewalk as a company won't support X1 on a machine running below the listed specs. You could probably get performance close to, equal to or even better than 8.5 on your machine with X1, so it's worth trying it with your current setup first, unless you already wanted to get a new laptop in the first place. I get better performance with X1 than 8.5 on my machine, which is slightly below listed X1 specs.

chuckebaby

DayDay72


Sonar + laptop = high latency DPC and poor performance.......at least for this generation laptop...unless you can luck up, or get a custom designed laptop....

day day..that is increadibly nonsence.i run the dpc latency shecker on my lap top daw and it under 40 u's.what have you got?

I dont use a laptop...I tried on both a Satellite Pro, and on a HP dv6t, and the performance was horrible.  Then I searched online, and found the dpc latency checker, and trued it out.....the idle was green on both, but I kept getting clicks, and pops...I also did all the necessary 'tweaks'...when my track count increased to 8 instances of Dimension, I would get drop outs....I am sticking to my custom built desktop until the next generation laptops arrive.....I also had problems using input monitoring of my VST's to record wet vocals....although I mostly use them for headphone monitoring, the latency was unacceptable vs my desktop, and I got pops and drops....I did have better luck using the onboard soundcard and ASIO4ALL, but I was not impressed with the vocals that were recorded as  it was very far away from what I am used to.  Perhaps I am a bit spoiled on my desktop, but judging from my experience, and seeing very similar posts on several boards, including this one, I am sticking by my statement 10000%.....If the poster is coming from 8.5.3 on a desktop, or a laptop that was made 2-2.5 yrs ago, he will more than likely notice the limitations on his new laptop.....it is the difference between night and day, at least for me.
I am now debating building a mini pc...

DayDay72

chuckebaby

DayDay72


Sonar + laptop = high latency DPC and poor performance.......at least for this generation laptop...unless you can luck up, or get a custom designed laptop....

day day..that is increadibly nonsence.i run the dpc latency shecker on my lap top daw and it under 40 u's.what have you got?

I dont use a laptop...I tried on both a Satellite Pro, and on a HP dv6t, and the performance was horrible.  Then I searched online, and found the dpc latency checker, and trued it out.....the idle was green on both, but I kept getting clicks, and pops...I also did all the necessary 'tweaks'...when my track count increased to 8 instances of Dimension, I would get drop outs....I am sticking to my custom built desktop until the next generation laptops arrive.....I also had problems using input monitoring of my VST's to record wet vocals....although I mostly use them for headphone monitoring, the latency was unacceptable vs my desktop, and I got pops and drops....I did have better luck using the onboard soundcard and ASIO4ALL, but I was not impressed with the vocals that were recorded as  it was very far away from what I am used to.  Perhaps I am a bit spoiled on my desktop, but judging from my experience, and seeing very similar posts on several boards, including this one, I am sticking by my statement 10000%.....If the poster is coming from 8.5.3 on a desktop, or a laptop that was made 2-2.5 yrs ago, he will more than likely notice the limitations on his new laptop.....it is the difference between night and day, at least for me.
I am now debating building a mini pc...

hey i was getting those same clicks and pops you were talking about..guess what it was?..it the wireless on your laptop..those signals are so strong they throw interference to the interface and soundcard.
i have my wireless in device settings set to disable.now it s a charm.try it..tell me what happens some time.
the dpc checker is what told me thats what it was.i started disabling things till that was the last culprit.(that and i think it was beagle who suggested it at one point.
my daw is a sattelite only an i3..4gigs of ram,graphics feeze for 2 seconds at a time sometimes when i have to many plugs showing.becides that some serious smooth sailing.

I haven't used it much, but I have a recent Lenovo i7 W-series with it installed.  Let me know if there is anything specific you want me to check.

I think most i5 and i7 notebooks will perform, you can easily add a montor. I think you should be sure that whatever it is... it has a good fast drive. Many i5 and i7 notebooks have a 5200 RPM HD, be sure that the one you get has at least a 7200 RPM drive. Maybe it doesn't matter, but it was the decision maker between the laptops I was considering. I wouldn't worry about the lack of a firewire port, most laptops don't have them anymore and I think USB 2 is fine, plus USB 3 is in the wings. Many laptops are more powerful than yesteryear's desktops and don't worry about the heat of an i5/i7 chip, it isn't a problem. I think they redesigned the i7 and maybe the i5 for laptop use, I've heard someone say that but I have not verified it. My i5 does not run hot and runs X1 fine but I have not pushed it.
Oh... also, tryto make sure that it does NOT have a motherboard with the sound and video cards integrated. I have two Dell XPS M series laptops in my closet. They had this. The video card went out on one and the audio card on the other... in both cases the fix is to replace the whole motherboard and they are for all intents and purposes totalled... unless I just decide to spend the money to fix them and give them away.

Julien

my laptop was a under 500.oo dollar laptop a toshiba.for the sake of this conversation let me change my avatar to the dpc latency checker.and i run up to 4 or 5 midi trackssession drumer alone has a 9 piece midi section for each drum.and up to 30 audio tracks.all heavely sedated with vst's and mastering ,mixing vst's
listen to my soundclick page in my sig you tell me?..by the way i noticed you dont list your specs in your sig.is there a reason??..seriously..look around this whaole forum..more than half of us are using laptops..thats a fact.not sure why you have that notion about a tower is the only way to properly run x1.its misguiding informaition.look at my avatar.i dont know how to post pictures.so that will give you a clue about how little i know except this thing runs awesome.
 
as you can see in my avatar nothing in the yellow or red.no latency period.i also run a v studio and a focusrite soundcard both run latencys set to below 8ms..did you say 40ms?..seriously but show up on the dpc around 55ms.
so i can only imagine when you want to pack up your stuff to record your buddys or band it will be a tower,keyboard,mouse.cables.exc...ya i got a little bag with a 17 inch screen and a dual monitor i leave at home.but i can still do what you do but for how much less $??..i paid less than 500.00..you?

PavMusic


I run X1b on my Hp Pavilion Entertainment laptop (64bit 8Gb RAM 500Gb HD) and it works great - do have everything (wireless, phone sync, virus etc etc etc) all disabled when recording and mixing.
Good for me the laptop is the base for my mobile/location recording rig and set up exactly the same as my desktop - so switching files between the two easy.  16 track recording session out of live gig desk the other day and multi vox takes on weekend all continue to bed down without a hitch.

+1 i dont see how people are not seeing that this is the future right now.

DayDay72


Sonar + laptop = high latency DPC and poor performance.......at least for this generation laptop...unless you can luck up, or get a custom designed laptop....

Hey thats blatantly wrong what you are saying. Sonar on a Laptop equals poor performance.  Come off it. This is scare tactics and downright irresponsible to answer the OP like that.

You can run Sonar on a Laptop smoothly with no problems provided you buy a Laptop with decent specs. Maybe if you are an incredible power user who uses loads of plug ins in one session running about 50 tracks. Ok maybe in some scenario like that a Laptop might let you down. I dont know as I have never pushed my Laptop that hard but for the average user who pushes their machine from moderate to moderately hard a good spec Laptop will suffice for them no problem.

DayDay72

chuckebaby


my laptop was a under 500.oo dollar laptop a toshiba.for the sake of this conversation let me change my avatar to the dpc latency checker.and i run up to 4 or 5 midi trackssession drumer alone has a 9 piece midi section for each drum.and up to 30 audio tracks.all heavely sedated with vst's and mastering ,mixing vst's
listen to my soundclick page in my sig you tell me?..by the way i noticed you dont list your specs in your sig.is there a reason??..seriously..look around this whaole forum..more than half of us are using laptops..thats a fact.not sure why you have that notion about a tower is the only way to properly run x1.its misguiding informaition.look at my avatar.i dont know how to post pictures.so that will give you a clue about how little i know except this thing runs awesome.

as you can see in my avatar nothing in the yellow or red.no latency period.i also run a v studio and a focusrite soundcard both run latencys set to below 8ms..did you say 40ms?..seriously but show up on the dpc around 55ms.
so i can only imagine when you want to pack up your stuff to record your buddys or band it will be a tower,keyboard,mouse.cables.exc...ya i got a little bag with a 17 inch screen and a dual monitor i leave at home.but i can still do what you do but for how much less $??..i paid less than 500.00..you?

Dude, it aint that serious, but you seem to be making it somewhat personal. Perhaps to discredit what I am saying. The poster might want to google laptop daw and dpc, to see what the real consensus is.  maybe his performance needs are not as in depth as mine.  for arguments sake, I'll just state that I can record a project, and my track count goes into the three hundreds before I get yellow, and I can still play a live vst w/ effects at 64ms under asio.  I can also, at the same time, record guitar through amplitude, and vocals with reverb, delay, and compression using input monitoring vst's all without noticing the slightest bit of delay (I do know there is some delay, but hardly noticeable at 64 under asio).  my midi timing is awesome at 64 as well....oh and I record @24/192 for vocals as well.  That is my requirement for a laptop (although, I could accept 24/96 on a laptop).  show me the off the shelf laptop that can do that.  I dont feel the need to put my specs in my sig, heck I dont even feel a need to put in a avatar, been doing this since PA6, and been building machines since 99'. Perhaps you did only pay 500.00 for your machine.  My hat is off to you.  for laptops sake, I could not get the hp or the toshiba to do half of that.  I also noticed that others on this site, and other sites had very similar issues on their laptops.  BTW, you never saw me type that the tower was the only effective way to run sonar, so please so not put words, or worse, notions in my mouth.  I asked you what your ASIO buffers were....mine do not go above 64, because for me, it is noticeable.  maybe not for you.  Again, hats off to you.  Lastly, I do not need to go to my buddy's house to record, my people come to me because I do have a rock solid setup that I literally bank on.  I would love to have a laptop that could even meet me halfway, but clicks, pops, and hiccups get in their way ( although Im sure that the custom builders can).  This is why I posted the link in the first place.  I certainly was not trying to get into an argument about something that I have both researched and compared on my own dime.  but of you like it, I love it for you!!


P35d,  quadcore extreme 2.8, 8gigs, 4 500gbs, emu 1820m are my PC specs-for arguments sake....next you will be telling me that my post count isnt high enough?...smh lol

well i hope i didnt start a hate parade on you here and i am sorry if it sounded like i was being arguementive.i was only trying to debate the fact.i guess when i hear laptop"i dont know about thaT?"i just try to make a point to prove someone wrong as to its up for the task.again dayday.you bring up some awesome points and i dont think my laptop can do the things the studiocats are doing so though i may brag,these do have some downers to them.so for the sake of the debate.your a gentlemen. and i hope i inflicked no evil on your as..lol.
 
ps post count has nothing to do with it,you been using a little bit longer than i have..so generaly speaking.you probably know a little more..i started with pro audio 9.i still have it loaded on this daw.though the derect fx wont work unless there wrapped some how.but i use it for the mp3 encoder.thats linked to x1.
hold on and i will post my avatar to show you pro audio 9.(i know im getting carried away..but this time its for fun...lmao.)

 Here are the recommendations from cakewalk. These are some of the laptops that their own guys use when they go to shows to demo software.

http://www.cakewalk.com/PCResource/default.aspx

 IMHO a desktop is easier to configure and upgrade for less $$$ in the long run. I say that because other than putting in memory or a HD you can't do much more with a laptop. Laptops can be a lot more finicky to set up for DAW use with integrated audio/video and incompatible firewire chips. Hard to go wrong with something like a rain.
  If you do the homework required to find the right setup,laptops are a great thing but it is so easy to get caught with something that doesn't work too.
  No matter what kind of computer you use the OS will certainly need to be tweaked( I just learned this lesson the hard way). Too much background cpu stuff going on with my win7 64 bit.
  I just upgraded from core duo to an intel quad,the whole shebang only costed me 150.00 dollars.........FWIW.

I have M- Audio 410 (firewire) for my laptop when doing bigger critical things.  (One of my desktops uses the M-Audio 1814 firewire).  Also sometimes I use NI audio 8 DJ (came with Traktor)... it's low latentcy USB.  Without an external audio interface I will also use 'ASIO for all' drivers and they work very reliably for me if I'm not in the mood to connect the interface.  Use the DPC latency checker to check your laptop/desktops performance audiowise, and disable things like network stuff, wireless, on board audio device (unless using asio for all) 

Make sure your hard drive is 7200rpm or better. Once got a Dell laptop that the website said was 7200rpm then checked it at home and it was a 5400rpm.  Had to send it back.  I use eSATA for audio/sample streaming/storage.  Look at the specs on the Rain livebook studio.  It's worth every penny...

I can't speak for the laptops,but, I use an Asus i5 quad,12 gigs RAM, MOTU 24io. 2 HDs=2 TBs. Bought off the shelf at Best Buy. I installed the second drive myself. I have not even had so much as a hiccup on this thing. I have always bought HPs before. Took a gamble. Best investment I ever made. I use it daily in professional studio work. Maybe I got lucky. If so, I hope this streak of luck runs a long time!
 By the way, I have a friend that wants to set up a laptop for live mobile recording. In your opinions, is that feasible?
If I do live recording, I fall back to my Adats to do the actual recording and then dump to the computer. I have seen so many live situations where, even with Pro Tools and a truck setup has lost entire performances from electrical spikes or computer error.
     I would say he probably wants to do at least 16 tracks. He already owns the Alesis 24 machine. He doesn't want to drag out a mixer and recorder. He wants to be able to just carry mics and the laptop.
     I have advised him I didn't think that laptops had come far enough to be that reliable. Am I wrong?

Sidroe, thanks for the information and ideas.

As you know, professional applications are much more stringent concerning performance requirements and absolute reliability. But I doubt a nght goes by that someone isn't recording a bona fide concert and at least a live perfoemance, using a DAW with the software mentioned on this forum.

My interest in PC laptops began in Nashville when I saw what they were doing with MacBooks and Pro Tools. One prominent producer told me he sometimes flies to other cities to record bands live that he's working with. I asked him how complicated it was and he said, "I take my laptop in a backpack with some mics and that's it."

So, in my limited knowledge of how the pros actually do this and what they actually use, then yes it's feasible and it's being done all the time, and it's getting more and more common place and easier to do.

As for your friend and ADAT, I'm sure that is reliable and what he likes, and does a good job. But that is on the way out, and laptops and portable recording is on the way in.

Thankfully, I've seen it evolve in just my 3-4 years of digital recording experience to where it can now be done with a PC laptop, and for a price less that most MacBooks. I still think it's going to get much cheaper.

My hitch has always been that I really do like Cakewalk. If I could put it on a MacBook (without all the re-configuration and BootCamp and those things to modify a Mac) I'd have done it and it wouldn't be an issue with me. But until recently this simply wasn't feasible. The lack of Firewire capability on a PC was a major issue. I am just checking on the state of the art in PC laptops every six months or so on this forum to see how far they have advanced, and at what price. My ultimate goal is to have a PC laptop that runs both Sonar and Pro Tools smoothly. I mentioned the reasons for this above.

I know this is a Cakealk forum and I want to play fair and be nice, but I do really like Pro Tools. But I never liked it well enough to be willing to give up Sonar. This smart tool feature I'm hearing about puts Sonar one step closer to Pro Tools in function, and the two are really neck and neck with features. Still, I think Sonar provides a lot of good plugins and features that Pro Tools just doesn't.

Thus, my continued interest in one day having a PC laptop that will finally run both applications smoothly. And when it gets right down to it, I really just don't like Macs. I am not bashing them....they are nice computers and millions of people love them. I'm just not one of those people.

Thanks again!

DS