Laptop for Protools LE?

Music-and-booze

Hi, i'm getting protools le soon and was wondering which laptops would be best to run it on, my price range for a laptop is 5 - 600 euro but i could go higher if needed, would really appreciate some help.:D
cheers,
shane

DamagedTrax

go to the digi/avid website and check their recomended specs.
protools doesnt play nicely unless you stick to their recommeded.
an off the shelf dell (or whatever) generally wont be suitable and will only give you endless headaches which you'll get no support for as digi will just tell you to meet their specs.

its a minefield but can be done within your price range if you source the parts and build yourself.

if you cant build or dont know anyone that can then i recommend doubling your budget and going with a custom builder such as synergy at dv247.com

good luck :cool:

Music-and-booze

cheers for the reply dude, wouldnt have a clue how build a laptop tbh, and dont have enough time or know how for the custom route...
surely though a big company like digidesign wouldnt make a product thats not compatible with most laptops/pc's etc, seems like madness to me, purely from a profit-making standpoint if nothing else...
i know macs work well with it and also lenovo(sp?)'s but theyre so damn expensive

DamagedTrax

Music-and-booze wrote: »

surely though a big company like digidesign wouldnt make a product thats not compatible with most laptops/pc's etc, seems like madness to me, purely from a profit-making standpoint if nothing else...

thinking like this has been the downfall of many a person with protools. digi make pro apps and expect the user to have a suitable set-up.. ridiculous when you consider the market that they are aiming at with LE and M-Powered but digi are a bloody conundrum at the very best of times anyway...

but i guarantee you that if you buy an off the shelf pc you WILL have problems.

as an example of the minefield that is protools:

your firewire card MUST be a TI chipset.
you cannot run onboard graphics or sound.
mismatched mother boards and chipsets cause serious problems
graphics cards from some big manufacturers cause serious problems
irq conflicts cause serious problems (not such an issue on a tower where you can move pcie cards about but on a laptop its not that simple)
you must record to a seperate drive from your system drive. this is all fine with a pc where you can add internal drives but on a laptop you need to run an external firewire (USB is NOT supported) and that again leads you to firewire conflicts between your digi interface and your recording drive.

theres hundreds more but you can find them on the website.

these are the reasons why many go down the custom build route on pc. and mac users have their problems too!

to give you an indication of what i mean - i run an i7 920 quad with 2 seperate firewire ti chipsets. bios totally configured to their specs. seperate drives for protools, recording and samples. xp pro totally stripped back to 8 processes and i still get issues now and again.

i dont want to put you off as its an amazing piece of software but you need to make sure you have the right set-up or you'll spend so much time trying to get it working that you'll end up hating it.

have a look at the pc forum at the digi user conferance to get an indication of what you're up against.

http://duc.digidesign.com/forumdisplay.php?f=17

good luck.

Music-and-booze

Ok thanks a lot damaged, after reading your comments and lots of other things on the internet i think pro tools is a bit too risky on my budget and techno savvy at this time...:D

I've heard some good thing about ableton live so i think im gonna go for that instead.

One thing im finding it hard to get a handle on is midi interfaces, i don't know which to get, what price it should be, which brand are good, which is good with ableton specifically or if thats even an issue... i just want to be able to hook up my guitar directly into the software (via my pedals), is this possible with just the interface or do i need a preamp or is an interface a preamp already???... haha sorry im just so confused

purplepanda

Macbook Pro works without hassle & loads of processing power:D

A second hand one a few years old will do the job fine:cool: