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RE: Looping with a PC laptop... which one?

Hi Mark,

Right now I'm using a IBM ThinkPad A20/m that I picked up second hand
for a good price. It has a simple Pentium 3 700 MHz processor and I was
actually surprised to find out that this is enough for looping live with
Ableton Live. 

I'm running my instrument signal (sax mic and guitar line) into an EDP,
and then into an Akai MFC42 filter bank that is channel cross linked to
a Lexicon reverb. So I'm doing all the sound mangling before recording
loops into the laptop, and it doesn't seem I will ever reach the limit
for how much I can keep looping from the laptop. Normally I reach the
musical limit (when you feel there is no place in the music for more
sounds) well under 50% cpu usage. But then the EDP/filterbank can make a
rather massive stereo sound on its own.

But if I should go with the other strategy, to monitor even my direct
signal through the laptop and also perform all the sound mangling with
software plug-ins I would need a much more powerful machine. But as I'm
now going G5 for studio work I really don't need a faster laptop. Since
the Virtual PC doesn't work on the G5's I'm happy to keep a PC laptop as
well. And they seem to perform better with Albeton Live than the
PowerBooks do.

BTW I just picked up a M-Audio Audiophile USB and this is doing very
well with Ableton. Latency is never a problem since the record input,
starting and muting, loops is quantized and when looping back the
software compensates for latency. But you have to split the instrument
signal and run one line directly into the PA and then not monitoring the
other line through the software.

Best wishes

Per Boysen
__________________________________
www.boysen.se
www.looproom.com