Notebook PCs and recording

[bodayguy]

I'm thinking of getting a notebook PC with a pentium III.

Is this foolish if I want to do digital recording? Are there any

plug-ins that work with notebooks? I need sequencing and recording.

I've heard Digidesign is great, but it won't work with notebooks.

Any suggestions?

[Alon]

Protools works fine with notebooks.

 

You can get Ptfree (no interface) w/ 8 tracks

 

Or you can get an expansion bay - and get any Protools you want...

 

This relates to macs though, I know NOTHING about pcs & PT.

[Guest]

To use a PC laptop check out Cakewalk or Cubase if you need midi, or Cool Edit Pro, Sound Forge or Samplitude for digital recording alone. Plug ins shouldn't matter if it's desktop or laptop as far as I know. As far as interfaces, the ones that come to mind are the egosystems wamibox, I think roland makes one too with the edirol brand name, or for that matter anything that's USB.

 

The selection of audio interfaces is more limited, but there's stuff out there. The other stuff you'll have a problem with is the screen size. I got a 17" @ home and I find it barely adequate to look at all the info.

 

Rod

[b_3guy]

If it has stereo in's & out's, & a way to interface your midi, serial port, parallel??? port, USB, it will work fine.

[coyote]

I'm using a PII (not PIII) w/ its built-in 16bit card, and a shareware multitrack program called Ntrack (www.fasoft.com). It works very well! It does start to sputter a bit when I get to oh, roughly 12 tracks and use EQ, reverb, & compression plug-ins. (It also has MIDI sync etc.) Not quite as flexible as some of the better-known products, but it's cheap and it works very well. I'm sure a PIII would do wonders for it.

 

The main pluses of notebooks for recording are:

a) portability. Get a battery-operated portable mixer & a few mics, and record direct-to-digital ANYWHERE!

b) LCD display. No monitor-generated interference.

 

I plan to eventually upgrade to a PIII notebook w/ whatever 24-bit soundcard is available. Oh, and a CD writer so I can store unmixed basic tracks (those wav files are big!)

[Steve44]

I had a really detailed message full of links for you, but IE crashed when trying to open the Egosys homepage.....

First off, I want to say that I have no experience with running a laptop recording studio, but I know all the technologies that are out there. A thread like this has come up a couple of times and unfortunately there doesn't seem to be anybody who posts here who runs a pro-level laptop recording system. So you might want to try this question at Craig Anderton's board or other places like Audioforums.com

 

Digidesign is not going to be the way to go for a PC laptop. Pro Tools is compatible with Mac laptops only, the PC's have to be running Windows NT and have very specific hardware requirements (down to the motherboard). You can run Pro Tools Free on a reular PC, but you're better off going with something like Cubase or Logic.

 

Now you've said you want to use this laptop for recording. Do you want to record many tracks at once? There are unfortunately not many interfaces for notebook computers and they are not often multichannel. There are two basic types of laptop audio interfaces: PC-Card and USB*. For PC Card there are two companies: www.egosys.net, and www.digigram.com. The latter makes the VXPocket which is very good quality but pricey. They are now making a 4 in 4 out version but I haven't seen a price for it yet. Ego-sys makes the Wami Box, a PC-Card with a breakout box that records 2 channels, and plays back 4. Its converters are only 20 bit and there are some reports of driver problems. You can compare these two at this link: http://www.audiomidi.com/hardware/audio/pcmcia.html

 

For USB there are many options, most of which provide you with 2 channel I/O. The best ones are those that give you 4 channel operation, such as the Tascam US-428 (4 in, 2 out, with 8 faders) which is about $499, and the upcoming Mdiman Audiosport Quattro (4x4). Emagic is also making a 2-in six-out model called the Em2|6. You can compare other interfaces like this at audiomidi's usb page: www.audiomidi.com/hardware/audio/usb.html

 

According to audiomidi.com, the MOTU 828 will run on a PC. But the Motu website doesn't claim that at all, it says it's a Mac only product. If there is any ideal laptop interface, that's the one. But you'd need to make sure that your laptop has a firewire port.

 

 

*There are two other laptop I/O possibilities: firewire, through the Crest FB-88 which is not out yet , and PCI-slot, by using a Magma PC Card to PCI expansion Chasis , with which you can use any standard computer interface card like a MOTU 2408 or a Midiman Delta1010.

 

In addition to Interfaces, you're also going to need external hard drives and removable media like an Orb drive. You could probably survive for a littlle while just using the removable drive in addition to the internal Harddrive, but you will eventually need an external hard drive for recording audio if you want to do a lot of tracks.

 

 

Anyhow, I wish you luck. It's not an easy thing to just set out and do, there are a lot of choices to make , many of which require some tough decisions.

[bodayguy]

thanks steve44, that tascam looks fantastic!