My mother is out to buy a new computer. As a musician, her main interests are sound design and a little bit of video/graphical editing. Cubase, Photoshop, and the like. I don’t know much about sound editing, or what you need for it. I hear that the main issue is going to be processor and RAM. I’m looking at the Lenovo Z50 series. Her budget is 1000€ at the absolute most, but the less we spend, the better.
Any suggestions?
I’m not a musician, but several of my friends are and I’ve helped them with computer stuff over the years. I’m posting because nobody else has:
Does SHE know what software she likes? All my musician friends prefer Macs, normally because of GarageBand and iMovie.
Does she require portability? 1000 E (don’t have that symbol on my keyboard, sorry) would buy a killer desktop rig, both for right now and for future upgradability. With a laptop, you’re mainly paying for the portability and miniaturization as opposed to performance. If she doesn’t need to take her workstation around, get a performance desktop instead of a laptop.
Amateur sound editing isn’t particularly demanding on today’s computers. Any Core i series laptop with 4 or 8 GB would be fine. The AMD equivalents are probably OK too, but I don’t have direct experience with them. I will say that the Intel processors come with QuickSync technology, which can drastically speed up video encoding (if she does that from time to time) as long as the software supports it. I’m not sure if AMD offers competing tech that does the same thing.
If she can spare the money, having a solid state hard drive for the operating system and programs, in addition to a separate moving hard drive for data storage, would speed up operations quite noticeably, especially if she’s dealing with a bunch of little sound clips/images/etc.
IMHO: In terms of laptops, all I can say is that the small business products – regardless of manufacturer – tend to be of somewhat higher quality, and come with better support options, than their equivalent consumer versions (which tend to be poorly built and often will suffer from early keyboard, hinge failures, AC adapter problems, etc.) On a laptop, an extended warranty is probably worth it because any sort of outside repair is going to cost you $100+ for labor alone. For desktops, you can DIY a lot more, yet another reason to consider one.
What is her input source going to be? If she’s using any external instruments, she’s going to need some kind of audio interface (unless it’s a midi keyboard or controller. That can be connected via USB).
As noted - it depends on whether she is doing live audio (recording with effects) or just post-production editing. Given Cubase, I’m going with live sequencing and recording with effects. The video stuff will not be an issue.
In that case, I would suggest that the Lenovo may be a bit underpowered for real complex work (the top spec on the linked page is an i7 Dual Core processor). When I got a new laptop for audio work last year, my bottom line was i7 Quad Core, and 8Gb minimum (16Gb by preference) RAM. I expect a fair amount from my rig, though (live guitar and vocal effects plus multitrack midi rendering).
Use the 64-bit version of the software to get the best out of the available memory if you can, and stick a 32Gb flash drive into one of the USB slots to use as a dedicated ReadyBoost cache - not as fast as a hybrid or SSD, but a lot cheaper and better than the stock drive.
I got an Acer which fit my price point (which was similar to yours, but in the UK) - I have had good experiences with them over many years, but look around. There are probably a few older models available that are close to being replaced with new ones that should fit your price/performance point. You might not get something that looks quite as good, though.
Wow, that seems like overkill. Have you ever measured your system utilization in daily use? I’d curious how much of that power you end up actually needing. (It doesn’t sound all that different from what my Pentium + SoundBlaster used to do…)
[QUOTE=Schlock Mercenary Maxim 37.]
There is no ‘overkill.’
There is only ‘open fire’ and ‘I need to reload’
[/QUOTE]
I hit up to 50% CPU at times, and I don’t have all the dynamic sequencing and processing going on that I want, yet.
High quality samplers use gigs of memory for sample cache, I have multiple tracks running and recording, and all with 24-bit audio and low latency …
It all just eats CPU and memory. We used to do it with Pentiums and SoundBlasters … but we can do a whole lot more of it now.
