Musician needs advice for laptop recording and editing!

[Pelicana]

Hi all,
I'm in serious need of some advice about which Apple laptop to buy in order to finish a musical project with a looming deadline.

To put it into context, I am a musician who is finishing an album with a slew of protools files that I need to edit and work on outside of the studio. The music runs the gamut from sessions with 2 tracks to sessions with 20+ tracks and was wondering what Mac laptop would be best and most reliable for working on these sessions. I would also like to utilize the computer for recording as well.

I am switching from PC and have done hours of research on this topic but am still unsure of exactly how to proceed. Do the new MacBooks run properly with ProTools yet? Is there a significant difference between the MacBook and the MacBook Pros for my line of work? Could I just as easily use a Powerbook G4 or even a IBook G4 for this audio work? I'm not interested in video games, video processing, photo work or anything other than the audio work at hand.

Know any firsthand advice would be greatly appreciated. I've been searching through threads for the last four hours and figured starting a new thread would be the most fortuitous and sensible option as my brain is rapidly going numb.

Warmly,
David

 

[netdog]

The MacBook is very quiet. I wish they would bring out the Cube again. No fan made it a musician's dream.

 

[c-Row]

Don't know about recording, but I do sequencing, arranging and mixing on my 1.25 G4 PowerBook (768 MB) without problems. The only time I suffer from CPU power shortage is when I try to hook Ableton Live 5 (master) and Reason 3 (slave) together via ReWire, but they work fine on their own. Propellerheads however just released an update for Reason which includes updated ReWire libraries as well, so that might help.

 

[WinterMute]

Be aware that the Intel machines do not currently support Protools at all, Digidesign are still saying that the UB version will be available this month, but no word yet.

That said I run LE on a 1Ghz G4 PowerBook and have done for years.

A late model 15" or 17" PowerBook will be fine for LE, but a good external FW drive is really a necessity.