Laptop Rock

[909one]

I was thinking of getting a laptop to use in a live setting to replace the keyboards we usually use with soft synths. I was thinking that portability would be much easier, but I don't want to deal with system crashes on stage. Anyone have any advice/experience with this?

[AaaSS]

The obvious reply would be a Powerbook. I have the bottom of the barrel iBook from last year and it hasn't crashed once. I've been running DP 4.5 and Reason 3.0 on it fine. I hear they're going to start using Intel chips soon though which means the price should drop and they'll be faster.

[Chaorta]

i hate laptop shows.

[dolivas]

Originally Posted by Chaorta

i hate laptop shows.

bump same here. its like looking at someone play back the cd you have from them. if you wanted to look at someone look at a screen and play back that song you could just put a mirror in front your laptop and look at your fine self doing that...

[dolivas]

Just to bring up the laptop bit again. i've seen a couple of shows where the laptop artist has a projection screen with some pseudo deep abstract film playing on in the background. note to said artists: All you're doing is making us fall asleep faster to your set, and you ain't no Jean-Luc Godard banging Steve Reich on an iBook either.

[smopo24]

i just want to see them break shit; that's what i come for. if they let me break their powerbook, i'd totally be back for the next show!

[puffpastry]

i hate laptop shows

laptop rock=email rock

[lukedavo]

email rock = soft c@ck

[EvanExempt]

I don't mean to get all serious....

But I have a legitimate question.

I'm thinking about buying an EMU 1616 Laptop Audio Interface (that comes with a pretty extensive sotware bundle) to use with a PC laptop for live performance. I'd likely be running all 6 outputs simultaneously (3 splits to front of house and another one to my headphone click track and two other spilts for my onstage monitor amps) with minimal use of plugins and minimal number of individual tracks. This is for the purpose of playing guitar/bass and looping live samples over the pre-recorded music on the laptop.

I don't have any idea what type of specs I will need to do this. I need a machine that is fast enough to handle less than 8 multiple tracks routed to all six outputs. I can't have any pops, or glitches. What is the bare minimum Laptop that I can get away with?

(And please, save your comments if you plan on telling me to buy a Mac)

Thanks!

[dolivas]

Originally Posted by EvanExempt

I don't mean to get all serious....

But I have a legitimate question.

I'm thinking about buying an EMU 1616 Laptop Audio Interface (that comes with a pretty extensive sotware bundle) to use with a PC laptop for live performance. I'd likely be running all 6 outputs simultaneously (3 splits to front of house and another one to my headphone click track and two other spilts for my onstage monitor amps) with minimal use of plugins and minimal number of individual tracks. This is for the purpose of playing guitar/bass and looping live samples over the pre-recorded music on the laptop.

I don't have any idea what type of specs I will need to do this. I need a machine that is fast enough to handle less than 8 multiple tracks routed to all six outputs. I can't have any pops, or glitches. What is the bare minimum Laptop that I can get away with?

(And please, save your comments if you plan on telling me to buy a Mac)

Thanks!

Probably to do live work with a laptop you might want to get a 1.2GHZ and above Pentium 4 CPU or AMD 1.0GHZ and above K6 series processor with at least 512MB of memory. Something else you might want to do is free your performing PC from having many unneeded programs and tasks running in the background i.e. dont have Norton Antivirus running silently on your performing laptop. A fast harddrive at 7200RPMs or above is also preferable since normal laptop hard drives experience lags in playback because they run at 5600RPM or 4800RPMs standard, i believe. Also running off the power supply and not the battery should help as well. That's pretty much what I would use to perform with a laptop. Also very important! deactivate the Windows sound scheme.. you dont want that annoying ping popping up when you're jamming because it saw you had updates ready install for Windows XP!!!