need your advice

[charlie2]

hi

i'm thinking of getting a macbook air 13 inch. it has 8 gb of memory.

i know its small but could it handle my pro tools, plus east west and garrittan libraries? i also use the finale notation.

thanx for the help

[hummingbird]

I don't think 8GB will do it for sample libraries...

[charlie2]

how much would i need?

right now i have the east west, finale and pro tools in an old dell. it's dying. the properties on that say it has a 227GB capacity. Is that right? compared to a macbook air of 8GB? are we talking about the same thing here?

[hummingbird]

227 GBs is a heck of a lot more than 8 GBs

For EWQL, it depends on which one you are using but here's the stats-
EWQLSO PLATINUM COMPLETE PLUS 24-BIT AND 16-BIT (194GB)
EWQLSO PLATINUM COMPLETE 24-BIT (117GB)
EWQLSO GOLD COMPLETE 16-BIT (33GB)
EWQLSO SILVER COMPLETE 16-BIT (11GB)

As you can see, 8GBs wouldn't even manage the Silver version.

Garritan recommends at least 16GB of free hard drive space.

I'm no expert, but I'd suggest you look for something similar to the Dell at least - 300 GBs memory and 8 to 16 GB of Ram.

cheers
Hbird

[Len911]

how much would i need?

right now i have the east west, finale and pro tools in an old dell. it's dying. the properties on that say it has a 227GB capacity. Is that right? compared to a macbook air of 8GB? are we talking about the same thing here?

no

227GB is the hard drive, the mac is 8GB of ram. It looks like they come in either 128gb flash drive, or 256 or 512gb.

The flash storage is PCIe-based, which makes it faster than the SATA-based solid-state drives (SSDs) and flash storage in older ultraportables

cool!



http://www.macmall.com/n/MacBook-Air/ma ... vLinks.221

The 8gb ram really depends on how you work. How many tracks with say East West instruments open at once and how many effects on each of those channels. If there's too large a load, then it becomes questionable if the 1.6Ghz processor speed is fast enough. Pro Tools, Finale, Garritan, all running at once shouldn't cause it to blink at all.

If you wish to be able to open 40 tracks at once with all effects in the chain active without using freeze tracks or pre-rendering or premixing of groups or any methods of load conservation, and consider that a necessity and not a luxury, then you will need an extremely powerful computer.

Charlie, I still have <4gb ram, and because I am so used to leaving a light footprint when I work anyway, I wouldn't exercise it,lol! I don't even use freeze track, because it is just too easy for me to delete a track, make adjustment and re-render. Personally, my priorities were always software over hardware.

[hummingbird]

ah yes. If it's 8GB Ram you're talking, that's cool, I used that for awhile until I could upgrade. I thought you were talking about memory

[Sunset]

Charlie,

I have a macbook 15 inch .. depending on what genre you write in 8 Gig of MEMOrY might be enough..-but maybe not for large orchestral templates, where the max 16 gig of memory is more useful.. Since I do write some orchestra, my macbook has 16 gig memory with about 500 gig hard drive( flash) used for my programs- which includes 3 DAWS(!) Sibelius, and other general stuff.

Also suggest you consider an external hard drive 7200 rpm( if you can find it) for all your VI programs..East west Kontact,etc.... it'll save you precious her disk space...

If you run low on your physical memory when producing, you can always bounce your midi files to audio to free up memory...


John

[lesmac]

Hi Charlie

Check out this thread:

http://forums.taxi.com/topic126494.html ... shed%20mac

You might want to pay attention to the refurbished mac suggestions. Being able to load up with third party ram is desirable.

If your are running third party effects plugins in pro tools as well as your sample players etc they can be a drain on ram.

Ive noticed performance drags in Pro tools when using some waves plugins, melodyne, Goliath, some boutique type plugins.

I've found a nice little shortcut recently for making rows of plugins inactive: ctrl + opt + cmd + click on a plugin and all plugs in that slot on each track become inactive. I'm away from the studio atm and am not sure if its all those 3 modifier keys or just 2 of them but a bit of trial and error and you'll soon find out. It doesn't take long to make all plugins in the session inactive to free up resources. Holding down the shift key when you open a session will do the same but I like this method better.
Ctrl + opt + click will bypass but that won't ease the load.

In earlier versions of Pro tools it was a good idea to close the DAW and re-open during long sessions to combat "memory leak". I'm not 100% sure if it is still the case these days but if you are in a pickle you'll try anything.

[Kolstad]

The macbook air with i5 and 8gb ram is definitely small by todays standards, and I wouldn't expect the east west libraries to run smooth on that. Play is a well known cpu hog, and just loading a couple patches could easily eat up 8 ram, and become cumbersome. So, don't expect to be able to design big templates with that. One or two patches of east west at the time, it may handle. Pro Tools and Garritan + Finale shouldn't be a problem.

[andygabrys]

this is indeed a good thread

Check out this thread:

http://forums.taxi.com/topic126494.html ... shed%20mac

since the time of that last post, Kayle ended up buying a used 12 core mac pro similar to the one I got - but cheaper and more powerful as its now 1.5 yrs past when I upgraded.

Please look at all your options before dropping money on anything like the MacBook Air.

If you are looking for a portable solution, the best bet would be too look for a used or refurbished Macbook Pro from 2011 (or early 2012) that DOES NOT HAVE THE RETINA DISPLAY. The retina display models had a lot of non-user upgradable parts.

There are several people I know of who have bought the 2011 era MBP and maxed out the memory to 16 GB (about $80 on Macsales.com) and have added a second internal drive to replace the DVD drive using the Data Doubler from Macsales.com and even replaced the internal drive(s) with SSDs - also available at macsales.com but I have found great results with these Samsung 850 EVO drives https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-850-EVO- ... B00OBRFFAS and they are hard to beat for reliability and warranty (5 yrs) and price per GB of storage. Go of the 1 TB ones if you can afford it.

BTW - external DVD drives that connect via USB are like $50 now so if you really need DVD's that's an easy way to go if you have replaced the DVD drive in your machine with the data doubler.

a frequent collaborator of mine (Robbie Hancock) bought one of these 2011 MBP for an EXCELLENT price and its far eclipsed his old desktop computer with abundant power.

If you go with that and get SSD's you will have a good hope of running orchestral stuff as long as its not too massive (and you are using Pro Tools 11 or above so you can use the 64 bit memory address - I seem to recall you were working with PT 8 last time you posted).

If you are worried that this might not be enough, look for a used 12 core mac Pro 5,1 model. Don't go for an 8 core, and don't get a 4,1 or earlier mac pro. There are a few to look at but in general you need to know what you are buying.

Any questions feel free to PM me. I have a pretty good knowledge of how to upgrade your computers with used mac stuff so you can get the most bang for your buck.

Good luck