I have an old laptop that I am thinking of using for on location recording, won't be anything extravagant just 3 or 4 audio tracks. Looking at the minimum specs for both Sonar X1 and X2 it is hard to determine whether an Intel® CoreTM2 Duo processor T6400,2.0GHz would be beefy enough to undertake this task.

I do have Sonar 8.5 sitting around gathering dust, which may be a better bet. Any opinions would be most welcome and before anyone asks yes the laptop hard drive has been upgraded to a 7200rpm model :)

Adrian 

i always find it better to try it out first... should be ok, but turn the tv on in the living room and set up 4 mics and let sonar run while you're asleep. if it's good in the morning, look for spikes in the audio and any possible glitches.  proof is better than assumption always! :D

I/O of the hard drive is probably as important, if not more so than processor speed for audio recording, assuming you aren't doing a lot of input monitoring of fx etc.

Try it and see is the easy answer but I think you'll find it'll be fine .

I realise I/O on a hard drive is important, so I've ripped out the 5400rpm one and put a 500gb 7200rpm drive in it's place. Probable get a small drive caddy for the 5400rpm drive for backup purposes when I am out and about recording.

The main use of this laptop would be to record a pipe organ, piano and also make a recording of my Choir in order to try and put a CD together for charity. The idea is to do the recording on the laptop and then transfer it to my main rig for mixing etc, specs of which are in my signature below.

Bio - it should work great.  I've done the exact thing with mine albeit a Core Duo P9500. But I ran all morning tracking our praise team. 16 tracks at 24/48. Not a hitch. But as swamp mentioned try it out. Perhaps run rehearsal in the sanctuary and just let it run.

as long as it is for charity than it should be fine :)
no better way than to test it out but I give it another thumbs up
best of luck :)

Thanks for all the responses. I will certainly post some recordings in the song forum when I get everything up and running.

Well I got everything setup over the weekend and tested out by recording me playing my acoustic upright at home. Everything worked without a hitch

http://biodiode.com/mp3/O%20Crux%20Ave.mp3

As a first recording I don't think it was too bad, apart from someone listening in finding a squeaky floorboard at the beginning. Time to go off and record some of my pipe organ repertoire.

biodiode


I have an old laptop that I am thinking of using for on location recording, won't be anything extravagant just 3 or 4 audio tracks. Looking at the minimum specs for both Sonar X1 and X2 it is hard to determine whether an Intel® CoreTM2 Duo processor T6400,2.0GHz would be beefy enough to undertake this task.

I do have Sonar 8.5 sitting around gathering dust, which may be a better bet. Any opinions would be most welcome and before anyone asks yes the laptop hard drive has been upgraded to a 7200rpm model :)

Adrian 

I've recorded over 25 tracks on on a Duo 2.8 using 8.53, 4 should not be a problem?