The Song Fight Bulletin Board

i'm a college student, and for once that actually has an advantage: my school's computer store is selling macbooks for $699 with the purchase of apple care (it's normally $1049 in my school's store). i really wanna get this deal, not only because it's a great price, but because my current dell laptop is complete shit. i was originally gonna wait for leopard to come out... and there's another deal where buying a macbook gets me a free 1 gb ipod... but i'm figuring that the savings i get on this will be enough to cover a leopard upgrade and a nano (and the upside is i don't have to wait)

my only concern is that the only way to get the offer is to buy the 1.83 Ghz, 512 RAM version. Will this be powerful enough for recording? I mean, I assume the processor is fine, I just am concerned about the "512".

I guess I could just buy it anyway and if I decide not to keep it, just sell it on ebay or something and make a couple hundred bucks. But it would be great to have a new recording computer.

dude, ram is upgradeable.

Yeah, you'll want to buy an extra 1GB of RAM, or you could scrape by with just an extra 512GB. You want to have at least 1GB total, though more is basically always better. More RAM is particularly important for the MacBook because it has a graphics chip that uses your main RAM for it's video RAM. It doesn't have its own dedicated video memory. One other consequence of that is that 3d graphics performance (which most people really only use for video games these days) is not going to be very good. But if you're not a gamer then it should be fine.

The latest model, with the Core 2 Duo processor, is supposedly 30% faster than the older Core Duo models. Check if they're clearing out old Core Duo models for cheap when doing any price comparisons to see how good a deal it is.

And another point is that you're probably going to want to get an external hard drive for recording, as laptop hard drives are generally not as fast as full size hard drives.

It depends. Do your songs normally consist of a couple of audio tracks that you mix with a bit of reverb and compression, or are we talking more along the lines of several hundred midi tracks each routed to a VSTi with 10 fx inserts per channel and 20 global fx sends for good measure?

OK, so you're more likely to be somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, but the key point is where on the spectrum you are?

It's like saying 'Is my computer good enough to play this new game I bought?' without telling us what the game was.

Indeed, a lot depends on what your use pattern is.

For reference, I do most of my recording nowadays on a G4 Powerbook with 1G of RAM. For what I do, that is more than enough, though I tend to be more of the real instrument/microphone/multitrack kind of guy and less the super-duper plugin and software instrument kind of guy. I can easily run 8-16 tracks with a fair number of plugins going.

My previous machine was a 400MHz G3 blue and white tower with 384M of RAM, and even that was adequate (if one has patience) for what I do, though that was with a lot fewer plugins.

I say go for it, and if 512 turns out to be not enough, buy some 3rd party RAM. You really don't want to buy the additional memory from Apple anyhow.

Actually, some of the Apple RAM upgrades aren't total ripoffs anymore. Like upgrading the MacBook to 2x512GB of RAM is $75 on their Web site, and good prices for a pair of 512MB sticks of memory can be around $100. Do some price comparison between the Apple upgrade options and the RAM on this site: http://dealram.com/ before deciding if you want to upgrade.

Only do the upgrade from Apple if you can get it upgraded at the factory, though. Do not get the computer first, then take it for an upgrade at a physical (not online) Apple store. You'll wind up paying way too much. You'd be better off buying 3rd party RAM and installing it yourself, if you don't want the RAM to come pre-installed from the factory.

I used a dual G5 1.8GHz, and it's been good enough for me, except when I use too many fancy reverbs. I think the 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook should perform similarly well, at least, if not substantially better.

For reference, I can do quite a bit with my old PowerBook G4 w/1.25Gig RAM. (<a href="http://www.rogerroll.net/music/The%20Go ... 3">Song</a>) That had something like 18 tracks (maybe 10 running at any given time), with ample effects on all of them, and it wasn't smooth running, but it was certainly workable (in GarageBand).

It also has a lot to do with what program you're running. GarageBand is pretty memory intensive, but other programs, not nearly as much.

Did you know this?

My "Welcome To" was done in Garageband on a 12" G4 iBook with 512MB of RAM.

You're not going to suffer much on a Macbook until you get pretty fancy with your recordings.

Everything in my catalog(s) are still done on a G3 Wallstreet PowerBook, in Cubasis LE, running OS 9.x and 384MB of RAM. So there

Okay, the Reason song (Sunspots at the Shelton, or whatever it's really titled) was done on a Mac Mini, but the snippets of analog audio & final mixdown were still done on the Wallstreet...

Our "Pink Ribbon" was recorded using GarageBand on a PowerBook G4 with 512Mb RAM. We had used that machine for a couple other things (drums and bass on "One Less" and "Other Places I Have Lived"), but this was the first song done entirely on the machine.

A couple issues, though:

1) Our OmniStudio USB A/D converter and MIDI box gave us some latency problems, but mostly on it's monitors. The laptop's audio jack worked better. We never have this problem with our PC setup, though it might be a MIDI thing (first time doing MIDI recording, too!)

2) we couldn't open GarageBand's .aif output file with Audacity. So we moved it to our downstairs PC and mastered it in Audition. Again, probably an Audition problem, not a Mac problem.

The Macbook would not be a bad way to go at all. I use a PowerBook G4 for my recording right now, but I have used a MacBook and it can definitely handle the recording. Just don't try using boot camp and recording on the Windows partition, because that sucks. Macs are kind of made for that kind of stuff, and if you're going to record with a laptop, it's the way to go.