USE OF MAC BOOK PRO LAPTOP

[hmoreno]

I Need to buy a Laptop for doing fied recordings and cant`t decide. I`m thinking in a Dell Allien Ware but some friends insist in the use of a mac book pro, can someone help me decide or give me recomendations

[fl]

I use a MacBook Pro and although, as has been pointed out to me, it is unsupported hardware as far as Merging is concerned, I've been very happy with it. You will be limited to the Native version of Pyramix, but perhaps you already understand that. I would think that the Native forum would be a more suitable place for this discussion, however.

If you go this route, you will have to deal with the Boot Camp issues that can arise, so it's probably a good idea for you to look through this thread to get some idea of what you might be up against: http://www.gearslutz.com/board/music-co ... s-pro.html Most of what Timur has to say there, and on the RME forum, is pretty good information - although a lot of what he says in his older posts is no longer as valid as it once was. More recent incarnations of Boot Camp have gotten better in terms of their DPC Latencies, such that with version 3.1, it may no longer be necessary to kill the Keyboard Manager (renamed Bootcamp.exe since Boot Camp version 3.0). Again, you'd probably find more answers over in the Native forum from users with various versions of Boot Camp installations.

Of course a lot will have to do with what audio interface you choose to run.

There are those users on here who would never run with a MBP and Boot Camp, and there are those who are quite happy. You will probably hear from both camps. As for the other side, I have looked at this: http://www.gscreencorp.com/ - which looks pretty darned slick, with oodles of screen real estate...

[phaseboy]

There are people who are going to swear by either. In reality you will probably have some growing pains setting up your system either way, but once it's all sorted out whether or not it's running on hardware assembled by apple, dell, toshiba, etc... is not going to matter. I will say however that based on these forums and calls from colleagues it does seem to me that people running on mac under bootcamp seem more likely to have hardware compatibility issues - that said if you went with RME or something else that people here are using successfully I doubt there would be a problem.

So tech aside - it really comes down to personal preference. If you're buying this machine for the sole purpose of location recording to run a windows application - I would personally get a nice dell, asus, or toshiba machine as it will work perfectly, will cost a little less, and gives you options such as multiple 7200rpm sata drives etc... If you plan to use it for many other things and really would prefer to be running osx at other times then get a mac. The main issue with pc manufacturers if you're using a firewire interface can be the firewire chipset used - but in all honesty even then I would just get the machine I wanted and put a SIIG Firewire PCExpress card in it.

If your friends have some experience with pyramix and a "real" reason as to why you should get a mac that's great - but if they're just saying generic statements like "you have to have a mac for serious audio work" (that sadly along with things like "usb is too slow for audio" I hear all too often) - I would ignore them and get what you want to get.

As for me - I have owned and used both macs and pc's for years. My pyramix system that I use for location recording is running on an Alienware M9750 which is the best laptop I've ever owned - three years old and I have no intention of replacing it anytime soon. Would I take it to a coffee shop to surf the web - hell no with power supply it's over 10lbs - but as an audio workstation it's great.

Good Luck,

Mark