Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

2012 13" Macbook Pro for Garageband

macman70

macman70

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 15, 2012
16
0
Up till now I have been using a 2GHz, 4GB RAM white 2008 Macbook for my music work. Garageband has been good and I keep my projects on a Firewire drive, the Macbook has firewire 400.

I was considering an iMac but I do love portability of Macbook. How will the current 13" Macbook Pro serve me for Garageband use or using another DAW such as Reaper. I mainly record tracks to a Zoom recording unit so I will not tax the Macbook Pro too much for USB recording but I will use it a lot for mixing and production. Small screen does not bother me too much as I come from a 13 " Macbook and can hook up to a monitor if I wish.

I do not plan on swapping hard drive for a SSD and i know the Hard drive is 5400 rpm. One thing I despise is if I get errors in Garageband such as "Disk Is Too Slow". Based on specs of 2012 MB Pro 13" as standard, how do you guys think it will fair for use of Garageband and Audio?

thanks in advance.
 
A Macbook Air would outperform your old Macbook and have much faster disk access because of the SSD. The entry level 13" only has a 128GB SSD though so you might need an external drive (faster now because of USB 3) for large amounts of storage. Another downside is the need to use an adapter to get Firewire via the Thunderbolt port.

The 13" MBP has the benefit of being pretty upgradeable down the line, but adding an SSD to start with would be $100-$300 depending on the capacity you wanted.
 
Should be more than enough

From the looks of things, seems like it would be more than adequate. If you don't plan in using more than 20 instruments at a time. I think that machine will hold up just fine.

If you plan to upgrade the ram, then do so.

As for SSD, I don't see why not upgrade. And I don't think the errors will show up claiming it to be too slow because having more RAM will definitely help out in needing to have the system read from the hard disk a lot less because the ram is doing more of the work. So you should be just fine.

Hope that helps. Oh and I hope you will use a FireWire 800 audio interface if recording :)
 
I use my 2009 macbook pro witch 2.53 C2D, 4 gigs of ram and a WD scorpio blue 640gb for live shows using Logic pro 9 and it works just fine.
I've also used it to record with a m-audio fast track pro and it works just fine.
So unless you're a professional music producer that needs 100+ tracks, go for it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back