New Zealand Heavy Metal Forum & Discussion

[Obzen]

I need to buy a laptop that will run Cubase + Ezdrummer.

I'll be recording upto 8 tracks at once for drums.

I don't want to spend much money, I'm looking on trademe for a good deal laptop, but I want to know what kind of RAM and CPU speed I should be looking out for at a minimum to run this software without struggling too much.

[Burning Beard]

Are you looking at getting a lappy with a kickass sound card? And are you going to be recording other tracks (ie, recording guitar tracks on top)??

Without a decent sound card you'll need a fair amount of grunt if you're intending it to be a full DAW.

I luuuuurve EZdrummer!

[Torturor]

I'll be recording upto 8 tracks at once for drums.

a lappy with a kickass sound card

If such a machine exists, bring me one back from whatever future/parallel dimension you guys divide your time betwixt.

[Obzen]

Are you looking at getting a lappy with a kickass sound card?

Without a decent sound card you'll need a fair amount of grunt if you're intending it to be a full DAW.

Well... I don't really know a lot about specs, and I wasn't thinking about soundcards.
So give me a couple of desirable scenarios e.g. "with a xy32.1 Sound card you will need about 64 Zelatrons of Halderax and 12.5 Xeunits, however with only the x2.d9 sound card you will need at least 144 Zelatrons and 70 Xeunits"

And are you going to be recording other tracks (ie, recording guitar tracks on top)??

yes, but with mixdowns so as to not demand too much of the system.

e.g.
I want to:
Record drums: And then mix them down to a single track before recording guitar/bass/vocal tracks on to it.
Programming drums: On top of mixed-down guitar/vox tracks.

I luuuuurve EZdrummer!

[Burning Beard]

I'll give you my old scenario as something to go by.

I didn't have a good sound card, but had pretty good specs for the day. A quad-core desktop PC with 4GB RAM.
I used the ASIO4ALL wrap-around driver that emulates a sound card - this allowed me use the machine as a studio.

Programming beats using EZDrummer via Fruityloops wasn't too demanding on the system at all.

Recording multitrack (I used Audition) was VERY CPU intensive and it made playback quite choppy unless I flattened some of the tracks.

I tried running just one virtual guitar amp on Audition on my fiancee's laptop (dual core, 2GB RAM) and the latency was absolutely insufferable.

So, with all that in mind - I reckon, at a bare minimum, get a dual-core processor or better and at least 4GB RAM. A faster RPM hard drive would also help.

[Death]

Get a newish Macbook Pro (Prob want atleast 4gb ram maybe 8), and a reasonable 8(+) track USB input device.

I'd use logic pro.

Bam sorted.

[Obzen]

Cheers for help guys.

Just don't wanna buy something for this purpose, buy something inadequete and end up being frustrated to no end.

The 'minimum requirements' on both cubase and ezdrummer according to the websites are something ridiculously small like 500mb RAM!

[Torturor]

Programming beats using EZDrummer via Fruityloops

How's that done? Would be awesome having EZDrummer sounds on Fruityloops interface.

[Torturor]

Try to find a machine with an i5 processor and a 7200rpm hard drive,
RAM is cheap enough to be a secondary consideration.
Big screen would be an advantage too with the amount of tracks you're planning.

If you decide to buy new definitely get one with a USB3.0 port.

What recording interface do you have?

[Burning Beard]

Big screen would be an advantage too with the amount of tracks you're planning.

Screen real estate is a good thing to have plenty of.

(I just got two 24" monitors... no looking back now!)

[soundstorm]

My 2c -

I used to have a quad core 2.66GHz PC with 4GB DDR3 RAM running my PT system in the studio - worked well enough. In 2009 I bought a new Macbook Pro for personal use as well as location recording - 13.3", dual core 2.53GHz with 4GB DDR3 RAM.. This thing outperformed the studio PC. Just shows how much more efficient OSX is and how much better suited for recording and traditionally CPU intensive tasks.

Obviously, on of the main benefits of running a proper soundcard over some sort of emulation is the benefits of nice ADA conversion, decent (or even any) preamps, better monitoring options, etc. However, bare in mind, no matter what soundcard you have (unless you can afford a nice setup with onboard processing), you will still be using your CPU processing to manage the ADA, etc.

I've since bought a new Mac Pro - 8-core, 6GB RAM - awesome. Somewhat costly but no looking back!