The best 100% portable setup with macbook pro

[dannys1]

Hi guys,

Im just wondering some of your thoughts and suggestions on running a truly fully portable system - eg something i can use on a long distance flight, or the train, or parked up in the car, hotel room etc.

I see a lot of people using macbook pros or other high end laptops, but i dont understand using them as basically desktop systems with huge firewire soundcards, 3.5" external drives etc. I have my mac pro setup in the studio for recording, and a full desktop system.

What id like is what perhaps a lot of people dont have on here, which would be the chance to take projects from the studio, onto the laptop and have them playback the same (or as near as) in headphones to do further programming on.

The way i work is mainly programming, but also recording vocals and some instruments in the studio, or bigger setups in other studios and then bring it back onto my G5 or mac pro for editing and production. Id like to be able to do a lot of this without being in the studio, or start tracks on the laptop and open them up straight away in the studio to playback.

The first problem i see in this is, in the studio i have outputs 1-26 on the RME Hammerfall card, where as the laptop only outputs 1-2. So when i open a Logic song on the laptop, most of is not going to playback without be altering all the outputs to 1-2, which is a lot of wasted time. Is there anyway around this? A feature in logic, a program which tricks the coreaudio into thinking there are more outputs on the soundcard than theyre are?

Also a lot of programming is on the PPC G5 - will this open ok in Logic 8 on the MBP, or will i have problems?

I need to have my entire sample library with me, im going to put a 7200rpm 200gb hard drive in the macbook, and then have a 250gb hard drive bus powered, which together should be most of the sample library and all tracks im working on - will the bus powered 5000rpm hard drive struggle to play back samples etc? I need it to all run from the battery whilst on a long plane journey for instance.

Id consider the Apogee Duet, but it might be unnecessary when i dont need any inputs really, basically just for listening back, would the built in soundcard be fine for latency and sound quietly through headphones? Im going to use logics caps lock keyboard to avoid even carrying an external keyboard with me - so what im planning will basically be just a 2.5" 250gb hard drive with all the sounds on, and the 4gb of ram and hard drive upgrade for the macbook - and then hopefully i have a system for doing what i want, with the software problem of the outputs, plugins etc mentioned.

Any other hardware suggestions too...just remember its gotta be ultra portable and run off the battery if there is no laptop plug on the air journey.

- D

[numrologst]

if you only need a d/a then i would suggest the apogee minidac. It doesn't run off battery though.

I don't know of any truly high quality dac that runs off of battery...But the minidac is firewire bus powered i think

[dannys1]

Well not off battery, i meant the laptop battery, eg bus powered.

Something like the Echo Indigo (which i have for my old laptop) would be perfect, any idea if they plan to make this in expresscard format?

It still doesn't solve the problem of multiouts on the G5 and only output 1-2 (or 1-8 in the case of the echo card) on the laptop.

- D