What laptop for Mobile Recording Rig

[creegstor]

I'm thinking about putting a mobile recording rig together using a Presonus Firestudio Tube as my interface. Does anyone have any suggestions for a PC laptop? I'll be running either Reaper or Studio One. The laptop will be for tracking (and maybe some editing) only. I want to spend as little as possible while still being well able to record without too many problems!

I guess it's helpful to know the following chipsets are approved for the Presonus:

Agere/LSI FW323-06
TI TSB43AB23
VIA VT6308
VIA VT6306 (on some older motherboards this chip-set will only support a limited number of playback channels: 32 channels at 44.1 or 48kHz; 16 channels at 88.2 or 96kHz)


Known incompatibles for the Presonus:

ATI RADEON 9000/9001 IGP video chipset
USB/firewire and s400/s800 combo cards
Firewire cards with NEC chipsets
Motherboards with nForce4 chipsets


Thanks in advance!

[twelveight]

This is a sad time for FireWire equipped laptops. Very few laptops have onboard 1394 anymore, and those that do usually have JMicron or similar controllers that simply won't work for audio.

Your best bet for FireWire will probably be to use a FireWire ExpressCard adapter (Belkin or such), most laptops have ExressCard slots. However, it may still be a bit of a crapshoot for total compatability and stability, but typically a Belkin (with TI chipset) FW card is the way to go.

FireWire, it seems, is at a plateau where USB2 is getting all the coal right now, simply because it's more common and there are no controller issues that the common user can't work through.

It's really hard to beat HP lap's...and...dv7's have two hard drive bays. BING! That's what I settled on after weeks of endless research. Couldn't be happier. Works as well or better (using USB) than my equiv. desktop/firewire setup.

Hope that helps....

[creegstor]

Ugh. Not what I wanted to hear. I haven't actually gotten the firestudio yet though but I'm not sure what the alternatives are... I don't know of anything that's got a similar feature set. Thanks for the input!

[twelveight]

Originally Posted by creegstor

Ugh. Not what I wanted to hear. I haven't actually gotten the firestudio yet though but I'm not sure what the alternatives are... I don't know of anything that's got a similar feature set. Thanks for the input!

I know, but better hear it now than figure it out $$$$ later.

I'm not saying it won't work either, but it's far from guaranteed and you may have to try different ExpressCards and such. But then you may nail it and it runs perfectly the first time.

I would say give serious thought to going the USB route for your interface then, if you've yet to invest.

What do you need in an interface?

[creegstor]

Originally Posted by twelveight

I know, but better hear it now than figure it out $$$$ later.

I'm not saying it won't work either, but it's far from guaranteed and you may have to try different ExpressCards and such. But then you may nail it and it runs perfectly the first time.

I would say give serious thought to going the USB route for your interface then, if you've yet to invest.

What do you need in an interface?

Thanks for the input!

I need pretty much what the Firestudio offers. 10 preamps, a couple of instrument inputs and some line ins. It's perfect for what I want and I don't know of any equivalent. Can you recommend a bunch of laptops that I could look for even if they were old that have the necessary spec?

Btw, don't know if this info is of any use but Presonus only recommend the following express cards:

ADS Pyro 1394a
StarTech EC13942

So how would that work? You run the firewire through the express card slot?

*It's hilarious I used to build computers but haven't kept up with anything for the last maybe 4 years and now I don't know jack!*

[creegstor]

UPDATE:

I've found a few people who seem to be having luck with the ADS Pyro 1394a with the HP HDX16 laptop on Windows 7. However that's quite a bit more than I want to spend. Can you recommend something cheaper with similar components?

[diogo_c]

Try to get something with a 7200rpm hard drive, cause the typical laptop 5400rpm will let you down when running many tracks.

[steelcitysi]

I'm in the same boat, looking for a laptop for the Fireface 400. Yes, Firewire is becoming scarce and compatibility is a crapshoot at best.

Digidesign has qualified laptops for use with their Firewire products:
Windows Laptops — Pro Tools LE 8.0 FireWire Systems
Laptop Ranking for Pro Tools LE 8 Compatibility and Performance
Ricoh Pro Tools Performance Tool for LE FireWire Devices

Interestingly, the recommended HP Elitebook 8530w has a Ricoh firewire controller!
HP Elitebook 8530w - Gentoo Linux Wiki
This goes against what most people would say in the RME and M-audio forums, etc. I think this only highlights how messed up it is trying to figure out what laptop would work with what firewire interface these days.

I think if using a laptop and not a rackmount solution for mobility is necessary, I would forget firewire for longterm compatibility. There's a reason why RME is pushing the USB stuff now despite all of USB's issues...every laptop will have USB for the forseeable future. If you're going Firewire, you're gonna have to go the Apple route. Or you can buy a really expensive Elitebook or ADK system, and cross your fingers that firewire will still be around later...

[mrufino1]

I had a firepod (actually 2) for a while and they worked great with my IBM laptop and a TI firewire PCMCIA card (coolgear is the name on the card, don't know the actual manufacturer). I just replaced my T41 with a T60 and am very happy, way more than enough power for what you're talking about, available on ebay for $300-400, and built like tanks. Plus, I have a caddy for the expansion slot and I can take out the CD-RW and use a hard drive there, so I have an 80gb 7200rpm hard drive in addition to the system drive. In the future I plan to get a sata caddy so I can get a much bigger 7200 rpm drive, but for now the IDE one is fine.
For what it's worth, the T41 will record tracks too, I recorded 16 tracks at once with my phonic firewire mixer for 3-4 hours at a time (recording my band's gigs) with no issues. You can get the same type of caddy for the extra drive, but on the T41 I didn't have one and just used my external firewire drive, never had a problem. The T41 can be had for $100-150 on ebay. Not a ton of mixing power, although I did do some simple mixes on it, but definitely fine for tracking. I only had 512 ram in it, it probably would do much better with more ram.
Use a stripped down xp to run reaper, you'll be fine. Want to get more adventurous? Use ubuntu studio (perfect on an IBM) and track into ardour, mix on whatever you like. presonus interfaces work out of the box on linux. Then the T41 is without question powerful enough to track on.
Want to get EVEN CRAZIER? Use puppy linux running reaper. Check out synth's thread on the reaper forum- use his turbopup extreme and download all of the files from that thread to install. Puppy is really lightweight and I had a reaper mix going on my dell latitude d505 (pretty close in spec to the t41) with about 17 plugins on channels and a few reverbs, processor was only around 40%. Someday I'm going to try it on my t60.

[twelveight]

Originally Posted by diogo_c

Try to get something with a 7200rpm hard drive, cause the typical laptop 5400rpm will let you down when running many tracks.

I assumed that went without saying, a 7200.

[twelveight]

Originally Posted by creegstor

UPDATE:

I've found a few people who seem to be having luck with the ADS Pyro 1394a with the HP HDX16 laptop on Windows 7. However that's quite a bit more than I want to spend. Can you recommend something cheaper with similar components?

What's your budget? That's the big factor.

[creegstor]

Originally Posted by twelveight

What's your budget? That's the big factor.

I don't want to spend much more than 700$. $600 would be much preferable!

[twelveight]

Originally Posted by creegstor

I don't want to spend much more than 700$. $600 would be much preferable!

Gotcha.

Check this out....a little more than you want to spend (but isn't everything?)...but nice spec and you can use a Smart Bay to run a 2nd HD in place of the optical, so you can still run 2 HD's if necessary.

HP® Official Store — Buy the HP Pavilion dv6-1350us Entertainment Notebook PC, Espresso Black direct from HP

You should check out Toshiba too..

Laptops $600 - $800 - Laptops by Price | Toshiba Direct

Toshiba makes excellent lap's too and you can find a nice spec in your budget. IIRC, the ones I looked at all had RICOH chipsets.

[dullfangs]

i have a lenovo thinkpad t500

windows xp pro 32bit
intel p8700 core 2 duo @ 2.53ghz
3gb ddr3-1067mhz ram
7200rpm hard drive

it has not let me down. plenty of power for my own stuff, which isn't running 50-100 tracks like commercial pop stuff. i'm mostly in the 16-24 track range, with waves ssl on every channel, 4-5 instances of guitar rig 4, several synth vsti's, enough for me.

note i use a USB 2.0 interface, it works fine. have not tested the built in firewire (it's only 4-pin so why bother? not interested in using an external power supply with my laptop interface (which you must do with 4-pin FW, somewhat ruins the mobility factor)

[DoctorAcoustic]

Originally Posted by twelveight

It's really hard to beat HP lap's...and...dv7's have two hard drive bays. BING! That's what I settled on after weeks of endless research. Couldn't be happier. Works as well or better (using USB) than my equiv. desktop/firewire setup.

Interesting information. My wife just bought a version of the dv7 and it looks to be a good machine. The chipset is branded Intel, which should be okay. I noticed that there is a version with 2X500 GB hard drives (on my wife's machine her 1X500 is a Hitachi drive). Do you or anyone know the configuration of the two hard drives. That is, are they separately accessible or are they somehow linked together (I think that is called RAID striping, but I'm not sure)? And if they are, can they be "separated" so that they can operate independently?

On her computer, I couldn't find many BIOS settings, and none to disable the audio problem children like wireless and lan cards.

I've been having a hell of a time getting an RME Fireface UC (that's the USB version) to work properly with a different computer, and I am hopeful that the HP might do it!

[twelveight]

Originally Posted by DoctorAcoustic

Interesting information. My wife just bought a version of the dv7 and it looks to be a good machine. The chipset is branded Intel, which should be okay. I noticed that there is a version with 2X500 GB hard drives (on my wife's machine her 1X500 is a Hitachi drive). Do you or anyone know the configuration of the two hard drives. That is, are they separately accessible or are they somehow linked together (I think that is called RAID striping, but I'm not sure)? And if they are, can they be "separated" so that they can operate independently?

On her computer, I couldn't find many BIOS settings, and none to disable the audio problem children like wireless and lan cards.

I've been having a hell of a time getting an RME Fireface UC (that's the USB version) to work properly with a different computer, and I am hopeful that the HP might do it!

There are two bays under the cover, labeled "1" and "2". They are on a SATA bus so "1" will take priority. It reads them as separate drives automatically.

I use device manager to disable devices. Though I must say, I've done just a silly number of tweaks with this computer and as far as hardware goes, all you really need to do is disable WLAN and BT with the "wireless" button. It didn't run any better with everything or anything non-essential disabled, so just hit the Wireless button and you're good.

Service/software tweaks are another thing, but this machine doesn't need any hardware tweaks to run audio. I do have the ethernet adapter disabled in Device Manager, that's it.

I'm using USB interfaces and it runs like a dream. I usually use the lowest buffer settings without hiccups.

It runs WAY better with Win7 than with Vista.

[jnorman]

i struggled with the FW thing for a while on my IBM T61, which has a ricoh chipset. though several manufacturers said it was compatible with my laptop, i finally just bought a lexicon U42s - 4 channel USB2, with dbx pres - which has been solid and stable since day 1. bingo.

if you truly must go FW, the fellow above who suggested the FW express card is probably right.

[bishopthomas]

I've had problems with my Dell laptop and Firewire devices. I tried probably 6-8 different interfaces from a Mackie Onyx to M-Audio Profire Lightbridge and nothing would stay connected. I eventually gave up until I read about the chipset incompatibilities. Now I have an ExpressCard Firewire card with a TI chipset and a Profire Lightbridge and it seems to be doing much better (haven't tested it during tracking though).

[Gerax]

Originally Posted by bishopthomas

I've had problems with my Dell laptop and Firewire devices. I tried probably 6-8 different interfaces from a Mackie Onyx to M-Audio Profire Lightbridge and nothing would stay connected. I eventually gave up until I read about the chipset incompatibilities. Now I have an ExpressCard Firewire card with a TI chipset and a Profire Lightbridge and it seems to be doing much better (haven't tested it during tracking though).

What Dell are you running? I have an XPS M1330 and it works like a breeze with the built in FW port. Although it's a mini FW connector I've used it with the Lightbridge and PT Mpowered, and it's got a wonderful stability. So far I've recorded as many as 16 tracks at once on a simple USB 2.0 external drive @24/44.1 and the system stays solid and responsive. No hassles. Maybe yours has a different FW chip.

L.G.

[bishopthomas]

Inspiron 6400. I have tried different Firewire devices, cables, hardware profiles (disabling network devices, etc), operating systems, until finally the only thing left to try was the PCMCIA Firewire card. I haven't tracked anything yet but it stays connected and connects every time.

[jeffhamula]

This may not be what you want, but instead of doing a laptop, I just put a slim form dell into a rack. It fits into a 2U space with room on the side for accessories. I had to get creative, but it works for what I am doing. I have 2 needs in that I have 12 channel phonic firewire mixer for live sound, but also pack it up to take to track bands with the limited channels. My rack has a power amp in it, and sometimes a pre-amp, along with a place to store my wireless keyboard, mouse, and an slide a small LCD monitor. It isn't light, but it works really well and all the stuff is safe inside.

[sonare]

No one has suggested this yet-- but after 2 custom-built-for-audio shuttle computers I now have the most stable Windows machine I have ever owned-- a Macbook running XP in bootcamp. You can find a used Macbook within your budget, and the various chipsets seem to "play well" with Sequoia and other applications. My FW interface is Prism Orpheus.

Remember that you should not record to the same drive that is running the OS, and that recording is much less of a CPU hog than playback.

I used to figure on losing an hour or two per week dealing with the usual Windows stuff-- now if I lose an hour per quarter it is unusual.

Rich

[bishopthomas]

Originally Posted by sonare

No one has suggested this yet-- but after 2 custom-built-for-audio shuttle computers I now have the most stable Windows machine I have ever owned-- a Macbook running XP in bootcamp. You can find a used Macbook within your budget, and the various chipsets seem to "play well" with Sequoia and other applications. My FW interface is Prism Orpheus.

Remember that you should not record to the same drive that is running the OS, and that recording is much less of a CPU hog than playback.

I used to figure on losing an hour or two per week dealing with the usual Windows stuff-- now if I lose an hour per quarter it is unusual.

Rich

You're running your recording software on XP under Bootcamp? Having Windows only software and being afraid of the extra processing load of Bootcamp is the only thing that has kept me from making the switch to Mac. And a Macbook, no Pro? What kind of channel count are you recording?

[sonare]

It is a Macbook Pro but I wouldn't hesitate to use a Macbook. I record up to 24 tracks. Bootcamp is just the name of a drive partition and does not require any CPU overheard.

Rich

[ghellquist]

Originally Posted by diogo_c

Try to get something with a 7200rpm hard drive, cause the typical laptop 5400rpm will let you down when running many tracks.

Not in this case. You can run at least 16 channels at 9600/24 on a 5400 disc. I´ve done it often enough.

// Gunnar

[d_fu]

Originally Posted by sonare

Remember that you should not record to the same drive that is running the OS

I believe this is advice from the days of yore... I always record onto the internal/system drive (sometimes using a separate audio partition), even with seasoned laptops like my Toshiba Tecra 9000 with a fairly old 40 gig drive... Never had any issues due to system activity...
As for performance of laptop drives, I've recorded 64 channels of 24/48 audio via MADI onto an 80-gig-2.5"-5400rpm-USB drive, which is more than 6 years old, IIRC...

As for laptop recording in general, you need stability and reliability, not performance. That's why I stick to my old sub-GHz-Toshiba, too... I also use an Acer Extensa 5220, which works quite well, also with MADI setups.

Daniel

[XJR]

My system seems absolute rock solid, over 40 live gigs recorded and not one hitch. It's a Dell Latitude XT, recording onto a solidstate drive connected via USB. It's fed 32 tracks of audio from the Tascam DM4600 fireware card. Software is Reaper.

As d.fu said it's probably better to go for stability, you don't want something that gets hot due to a mega fast processor, or a games playing GPU.

[David Spearritt]

Yes, the most important thing about a laptop is reliability, meaning standard compatible hardware with well written drivers.

The DPC checker helps to diagnose poor drivers which will cause audio to glitch.

If I was contemplating buying a new laptop, I would run DPC checker on it first and disable a few drivers to see if you can get the latency low.