The Laptop for music making, what do I need to know?

[yeahright31]

Unhappy with my Mac mini, have bought a laptop from a buddy
Needs more ram and planning to upgrade the Solid State Drive, I have Ableton Live 9 Lite ready to go
What do I really need to know or be mindful of before upgrading this Laptop to be useful for music production?

Aside from the fact I get about 3 -4 hours battery life, before I grab the wall charger.
I won't be running Reason on it. Next year I will upgrade my studio PC before I move over to Reason 9 as my current Mac mini just doesn't have the power I need. 4 Gig Ram, i5 Never again.

[Gorgon]

4 Gig Ram, i5 Never again.

Plenty of good i5's out there. 4 Gig RAM is too low nowadays though.

Anyway, your post is quite unclear about what you want. Do you want to upgrade? Or buy a new laptop? And what are the specifications of the laptop that you want to upgrade?

[yeahright31]

Gorgon yes you're correct in saying nothing wrong with i5's it's the 4 Gig of ram that i've became unhappy with, just not enough power

I ended up buying the HP Envy Spectre XT, although I can upgrade the ram in this to 8 Gig and I have an option to upgrade the SSD (Planning to upgrade to 1TB
I'm wondering would it be worth it? The reason for purchase is to up get it powerful enough to run Native Instruments Komplete 11 with Ableton 9 Standard.

I'm aware I'll get about 3-4 Hours battery life at a time with this laptop as I've tested it out. I wondering will Native Instruments Komplete 11 run good if I was to have 8 Gig Ram and 1TB SSD? Because if it's not going to have the power I will sell my new laptop and start building a PC.

Am I giving up on Reason? No- More like taking a holiday from it.


Specs for my laptop-
https://www.cnet.com/au/products/hp-env ... xt/review/

[yeahright31]

Never mind friends been a first time owner of a laptop seemed more trouble upgrading it then expected.
I found out I couldn't upgrade the ram from 4 Gig to 8 Gig and it was unclear if I could upgrade the SSD in it anything over 256 Gig, that's even after me reading the manual. I gave up and swapped my laptop for an Ipad Mini Gen 3 with 64 Gig and bought Korg Gadget, i'm loving Korg Gadget and I've got Korg Nano Studio on Layby at my local music store.

Another thing i'm enjoying is Reason Figure, no regrets!

[Carol Rein]

Well... I don't know if this is the appropriate thread...
I have a laptop i5 and ram 8Gig and win 7 sp1, it works perfect with Reason and Kontakt, but it works at 100% cpu power only when using ac adapter.
When I'm on battery, the performance isn't enough for harder peaks, such as extremely high polyphony by sustained notes on piano (being 99 poly each group, it reaches 500 or lot more notes poly sometimes each piano, as there is one NNXT for bright and another NNXT for Una Corda, they're independent and overlappable by sustain).
Whatever...
No matter I change the power plan to High performance, when it is on battery, it won't reach 100% cpu but exactly the half of it.
Trying to find the issue I've seen the MULTIPLIER Core Speed (shown in CPUID) reachs 32 multiplier factor when powered by ac adapter, but it only reachs 16 multiplier factor when is on battery...
I've read that changing something in the BIOS is possible to avoid that limitation. I know that limit is programmed to prevent battery damage (for gamers), but as in my case I only need some peaks of full cpu usage, the rest of the time it'll be downclocked by windows, so the battery won't suffer.
Any suggestions? You must have gone through this, surely!
Thanks!!

[yeahright31]

Carol, I was about to go down that road, but having never owned a laptop and looking at the cost of upgrading my new laptop plus software and all.
Well I researched and found out I couldn't upgrade my gig, been stuck with 4 Gig just gave me the shits. I mean my Mac Mini has 4 gig of ram as well and it struggles to run most RE so i couldn't image my laptop running Komplete 11 smoothy with 4 Gig of Ram.

Long story short I ended up trading my laptop for an Ipad Mini- Gen 3 and I downloaded Korg Gadget, Liine Lemar & Reason Figure.
I feel it was a way better idea and I'm loving the choice I made.

[Carly(Poohbear)]

Well... I don't know if this is the appropriate thread...
I have a laptop i5 and ram 8Gig and win 7 sp1, it works perfect with Reason and Kontakt, but it works at 100% cpu power only when using ac adapter.
When I'm on battery, the performance isn't enough for harder peaks, such as extremely high polyphony by sustained notes on piano (being 99 poly each group, it reaches 500 or lot more notes poly sometimes each piano, as there is one NNXT for bright and another NNXT for Una Corda, they're independent and overlappable by sustain).
Whatever...
No matter I change the power plan to High performance, when it is on battery, it won't reach 100% cpu but exactly the half of it.
Trying to find the issue I've seen the MULTIPLIER Core Speed (shown in CPUID) reachs 32 multiplier factor when powered by ac adapter, but it only reachs 16 multiplier factor when is on battery...
I've read that changing something in the BIOS is possible to avoid that limitation. I know that limit is programmed to prevent battery damage (for gamers), but as in my case I only need some peaks of full cpu usage, the rest of the time it'll be downclocked by windows, so the battery won't suffer.
Any suggestions? You must have gone through this, surely!
Thanks!!

That does sound more like a BIOS setting.

What is the make and model number of youy laptop, also have you added any other hardware?

[kuhliloach]

1. 16GB RAM
2. SSD
3. The incredible magic of ASIO4ALL! - It makes the laptop very useful all by itself. Without installing ASIO4ALL Windows 7, 8, and 10 are totally useless based on the amateurish sound capability of Microsoft Windows. With ASIO4ALL your laptop will have low latency instrument playback using whatever internal sound chip is on the laptop's motherboard. Of course you can skip this step if you are using a native ASIO compatible sound device.

[Carol Rein]

Hi guys! Thanks for the answers and sharing!
About my laptop is a Banghó here in Argentina is a known brand, inside is a Clevo.
It runs awesome with RE and Kontakt, even heavy instruments like Friedlander's Violin from Embertone, streams from external HD very smoothly.
But the bios doesn't seem to let me access to the Intel Speedstep settings. I have to disable that feature, or that's what I've heard...

Regarding ASIO4ALL, are you having this issue?: I mean, when I use a DAW with ASIO4ALl, I can't use another device, for example, I can't listen an audio file in any player while Playing RE (or kontakt) at the same time... and that's a thing I need to do for sounds testing and such.
I use to compare my instruments with classical recordings, playing the same notes immediately after the concerto notes (piano, strings, winds, etc) , so I properly adjust them to match the real thing.

[Carol Rein]

I also have a desktop i5 with 8 gig, and a desktop i7 with 24 gig, but those are for 3D animation. I bough this lap for DAW specifically, because I like to move with my music. I play in the church and I love to play with friends in meetings and such. So a desktop computer is useless for my main music purposes. Of course I compose, so that's a thing I can do in my studio... but I hate to be trapped inside a studio all the time.

[chimp_spanner]

I use an HP Envy J130EA, which you can get on eBay now for about 500 bucks. It's an i74700MQ, 12GB of RAM, 2GB videocard and 1TB of (sloooow) storage. There's a spare drive bay, and I put the 1TB mechanical in there, and then installed a 500GB SSD for OS and libraries.

It's a good machine BUT...a word of warning; with laptops, you will sometimes get some very strange interactions or problems/quirks, and if you can't find a way around them with software, you're kinda boned. Example; my laptop has dual graphics (Intel HD and GeForce). Now you'd think this'd be good because the GeForce will handle all the graphical stuff, meaning the CPU is left to process audio. Nope. Turns out the GeForce piggybacks on the Intel, so graphics are always handled by the on-board chip, and I get problems when graphical elements refresh on screen.

Literally no way around it. So just be careful! Spec wise, it's hard to go wrong these days. i5 or i7, 8-16GB RAM and any kind of SSD will be fine for most people out there. But try and get some real feedback from other laptop producers and do your research because once you're stuck with it...you're stuck with it!

[Gorgon]

It's a good machine BUT...a word of warning; with laptops, you will sometimes get some very strange interactions or problems/quirks, and if you can't find a way around them with software, you're kinda boned. Example; my laptop has dual graphics (Intel HD and GeForce). Now you'd think this'd be good because the GeForce will handle all the graphical stuff, meaning the CPU is left to process audio. Nope. Turns out the GeForce piggybacks on the Intel, so graphics are always handled by the on-board chip, and I get problems when graphical elements refresh on screen.

This doesn't make any sense at all. The graphic part of the CPU cannot be used for general CPU related stuff. If you got visual issues then there's something else going on, maybe a driver issue.

[Kenni]

I've had no issues with my laptop at all, it's all I ever use for musicating (with balance). I've done fairly big projects for release as well on it.

Asus G56JK, in the i7 / 12 GB Ram version: https://www.asus.com/ROG-Republic-Of-Ga ... fications/

This project was done on my laptop:

[chimp_spanner]

It's a good machine BUT...a word of warning; with laptops, you will sometimes get some very strange interactions or problems/quirks, and if you can't find a way around them with software, you're kinda boned. Example; my laptop has dual graphics (Intel HD and GeForce). Now you'd think this'd be good because the GeForce will handle all the graphical stuff, meaning the CPU is left to process audio. Nope. Turns out the GeForce piggybacks on the Intel, so graphics are always handled by the on-board chip, and I get problems when graphical elements refresh on screen.

This doesn't make any sense at all. The graphic part of the CPU cannot be used for general CPU related stuff. If you got visual issues then there's something else going on, maybe a driver issue.

Well perhaps I jumped to a conclusion somewhat; point is, being a laptop, I'm restricted both in terms of the hardware configuration *and* the drivers available to me (generic GeForce drivers known to work well won't install on a laptop; you have to use manufacturer distributed versions). I get ASIO crackles directly linked to windows being dragged on screen, or menus opening, etc.

If you've got any ideas...I'm open!! Been an issue ever since I got the damn thing. Does my head in haha.

[Gorgon]

Well perhaps I jumped to a conclusion somewhat; point is, being a laptop, I'm restricted both in terms of the hardware configuration *and* the drivers available to me (generic GeForce drivers known to work well won't install on a laptop; you have to use manufacturer distributed versions). I get ASIO crackles directly linked to windows being dragged on screen, or menus opening, etc.

If you've got any ideas...I'm open!! Been an issue ever since I got the damn thing. Does my head in haha.

Always willing to help. But yeah, the fact that you can't install proper drivers is a huge PITA when it comes to laptops. I had the same issue with my Sony Vaio, and I"ll never buy another Sony again. I have Asus now who allow you to install Nvidia drivers straight from the manufacturers site, and obviously this makes a huge difference.

So what is the exact make and model of this laptop?