AW: Laptop help

["Rainer Thelonius Balthasar Straschill" <rs@moinlabs.de>]

Adding the proverbial two cents here: 

[       I would go for an audio interface that is firewire (make sure your
laptop as firewire too) and also MIDI on the same breakout box (check out
presonus, motu, m-audio, RME, etc...or just search on audio recording
interfaces until you find something that has those features).]

Another thing someone mentioned to me recently is that PCMCIA will be a
thing of the past soon - so if for some reason you absolutely want a
solution with its own interface card (RME cardbus, E-Mu etc.), it might 
make
sense to wait for a PCIExpress solution as otherwise you would run into the
problem that soon you won't be able to get a laptop which accepts the
(PCMCIA) card.
         
[       Whether you go mac or pc, make sure you get one with the Intel duo
core in it...I'd go for 2GHz and 1gig of RAM at least.]

And make sure to use software which supports multiple cores, as e.g. 
Ableton
Live does, or otherwise be sure to configure it in a way that the
application runs on one core, the audio interface's drivers on another.

If you want to do something else than just running a standalone looping 
app,
getting 2GB of RAM (or more) might also make sense.

And targeted towars the original message:
[               I mean, what CPU, how much memory, what audio/MIDI 
interface
do I need to achieve acceptable latency to loop?]

If you only use a standalone looping application, latency won't be that 
much
of a problem as the looper can compensate for the latency (at least Mobius
can).

        Rainer