Main Rig – Desktop vs. Laptop

You can do a lot with very little now and it’s kind of amazing how fast the transition has happened. I went from having a full blown Pro Tools HD 3 Accel system with an amazing array of outboard gear in a cobblestone house in upstate NY (pic above) to having a stripped down writing/production set up in my loft apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I was obsessed with the idea that you could only get the mixes and power you needed from a tricked out desktop mac and PT HD. My thinking eventually evolved, along with technology, and this is how it happened.

I’ll start my little geeked out story like this. I was one of those people that was so fearful of having to transition from the PowerPC G5 world to the new Intel Mac world for several reasons. Having spent quite a bit of loot on my tricked out G5 with 8 GB of ram and tons of internal high speed storage for all of my sound libraries and sessions, I saw that machine as the star trek command center that would last for years and years. Not to mention all of the software that wasn’t compatible at the time with intel macs, like Waves Plug ins/Sony Oxford Plug ins/etc…. I used this machine extensively for about 2 years in my studio and it was on almost all the time. When I moved to Brooklyn in July of 2006 I sold off most of my big gear and downsized to just a couple of racks and my G5. I was mixing in the box most of the time anyway so this didn’t really worry me. I purchased a Macbook 2.0 dual in June 2007 and started to see the obvious performance differences. But I still maintained that the G5 would be my main axe and the laptop was more for convenience and travel. Plus at the time I could only run a few apps universal binary.

The bomb drops……

So about 6 months ago I’m working on a scoring project in Logic on my G5 and notice that the cpu meters are only flashing on one side and are totally maxed out. The project won’t even play back and barely loads up. After investigating and restarting the computer a hundred times a realize one of the processors had totally fried, turning my G5 dual 2.0 into a measly little single processor machine ( no offense to anyone still rockin a single cpu, I’m just sayin….. ) . Now the G5 felt as old school as a mac classic and I couldn’t do any of the work on the sessions I needed to do without taking a million years to freeze all the tracks, and still it wasn’t that great after that.

Hmmm….. I guess I’ll have to make the move to the Macbook, hope I’m not totally screwed…….

So I should say that I had been noticing how the performance of Logic and Ableton on the Macbook had been blazing the G5, it’s just that I had all my hot plug ins and sound libraries sound neatly organized on the G5 so that my whole world existed there. So now I’m using Logic on the macbook for this pretty large scoring session and the thing is just running beautifully with hardly any cpu meter movement. I’m sold, I need to make my whole set up work on the macbook and keep the G5 around for PPC apps when I occasionally need them.

6 months later…..

Now my whole set up revolves around the macbook and I’m honestly loving it. When I saw how the Macbook, out of the box with 1 GB of ram, smoked my G5 dual with 8GB of ram I knew it was only a matter of time. So my 4500 dollar desktop machine purchased in 2005 was being completely replaced by my 1200 dollar laptop purchased only 2 years later. Everything is now organized on external drives and I just connect it to my cinema display when I need the big desktop feel. It’s so amazing to be able to travel and work on big projects without the computer keeling over and wheezing itself to a crash. This machine has saved my ass on several occasions on the road that I doubt my previous Titanium G4 could have even handled, even with track freezing. Not to mention all the included goodies like bluetooth, airport, camera, remote (cool for Logic), etc…. Did I mention that it’s portable? I know, I’m a dork.

Of course to mix accurately you need a good room and good monitors, but not necessarily a desktop. Since audio programs use up like no video processing the macbook is the perfect machine, well mabye not the new ones since they have no firewire (WTF Apple!!??). I’m still kickin old school with my trusty white macbook and the future looks bright as ever. It’s really free’d me up creatively which is really all that ultimately mattered, I can work with confidence anywhere in the world at anytime. I’m not thinking so much about tweaking the computer out anymore since it’s already great, focusing more time on writing/production. And if it unexpectedly keels over then 1000 bucks ( and a Time Machine back up install ) later and we’re back in business.

Bottom line is the excuse for not being able to make music on the computer due to limitations of power is long gone. Now that the new mac mini is like 700 bucks and is as strong as the macbook everyone will be able to mix large scale sessions natively. No problem. Of course if you can have the killing decked out home studio then that’s great. I’m just sayin………

As far as needing the mixing power/sound quality of Pro Tools HD versus LE, we will get to that in a later post. Thanks for tuning in.

Malcolm