Going portable

[mazz]

If you're going to go Pro Tools, look at their website and find out the minimum system requirements before you buy something. You could probably get a Windows laptop for under a thousand or a MacBook (not the pro) for right around a thousand. Budget in extra RAM and a nice fast external hard drive. Most laptops come with a 5400 RPM drive which doesn't really cut it for recording and/or streaming samples. It's best to have your audio files and samples on a seperate drive from the system anyway. You can get nice, fanless, 7200 RPM FW or USB drives these days, they're pretty much silent and will run off of bus power.I saw a mini M-box in a magazine recently. It basically looks like a USB thumb drive on steroids. Since you're already going to have an external hard drive and whatever cables, etc. you need, it might be nice to have a small audio interface.Another route would be to look in to the MIDI controllers with audio built in. I think there's even controllers with built in synth sounds (which takes some of the strain off the laptop) as well as audio I/O. Since you'll need a controller anyway, you'll have all your audio and MIDI handled in one unit. Most of these things sound pretty good (none of them are an Apogee and aren't trying to be) and most offer zero latency monitoring, headphone jacks, etc. M-audio and Novation are two that spring to mind. I think you could do some very nice demoing on the road with a minimal setup like this.Good luck,Mazz

[slideboardouts]

Quote:I was told, it's affordable and does the job for what I want to do. Even thought I've been using Nuendo since I started recording I might switch eventually to pro-tools only because everyone I'm working with (almost everyone) has it. I'll look into thr firebox though, now that you guys gave me a better idea of what my options are.Thank you very much for the help!xoxoxoJQuote:Why do you want an mbox? Those things have always seemed a little crappy to me. Last I checked mboxes were USB interfaces and you should really shoot for firewire if you can afford it. The Firebox that arkjack mentioned is a pretty good deal and is just as portable as an mbox. I'd take a firebox over an mbox any day of the week.As far as laptops go, my personal preference is mac laptops. I like there design more, backlit keyboard on the pro models, and I like working in OSX better than I do Windows (though there are a few little things about OSX that irk me). A PC will do just as good of a job though. With laptops especially it really is just a matter of which OS you like more: OSX or Windows. Just make sure you get the most powerful one you can afford.-SteveWell, if everyone you know uses PT and you are going to be transferring files frequently, then go ahead and do PT and an mbox just for convenience. You can upgrade to one of their firewire interfaces later. If you are only going to be transferring files every once in a while, then I would stick with what you know (Nuendo) and get a decent laptop/firewire interface. PT LE is a bit limited in my experience, and I've never been a big fan of the bundle thing. Just my opinion though.The thing that I understand about USB devices is that it actually uses your computers resources to operate whereas a firewire device doesn't. If you aren't using many VI's a USB interface would probably be fine, but if you used a lot of VIs then maybe it would gunk things up a bit. I don't know for sure as I've always used a firewire interface, but I can tell you that I have had issues with USB devices that I haven't had with firewire devices. I can also tell you that I know a lot of people who use a USB interface with hardly any problems, but they also use 0 virtual instruments.-Steve