Any Pro Tools LE / PB G4 1.5GHz users?

not sure how useful this post will be but here goes.

my collegues at work use Pro Tools LE on their 700mhz (or thereabouts) 12" iBooks with 1.25 GB ram. As fine as I can ascertain (sp?) its perfectly adequate. Iguess it depends on your project. You say your going to use LE so I assume you are running either Mbox or 002, and depending on what bit/sample rate you use, your harddrive may choke before your processor.

I'm expecting a 1.67 Ghz PB next week and I'd like to do some tests wtih pro tools at some point. In the mean time the guys over at OSXAudio may be able to give you a better idea.

May I take this opportunity to rant about how shockingly poor Pro Tools' MIDI support is?! Dammit digidesign - Pro Tools has been around for years.. sort yourself out, or I'll stick with Cubase forever!

:EDIT: The SoundonSound Forums / Magazine will be a good place to look to. They have a regular Pro Tools section and they highly rate mobility so theres more than likely some information you may find useful.

The brilliant thing about the Powerbook 15" and 17" is that you can add a second Firewire buss to the machine with a PCMCIA card adaptor. This keeps the drive datastream and the digital audio datastream on separate controllers. Just do some investigation on compatibility first - some audio interfaces are incompatible with certain PCMCIA firewire chipsets.

I'm currently using Peak and Audacity on my 1.25GHz mini with 1GB. It takes awhile to load a 2 hour Armin Van Buuren mix but thats to be somewhat expected. However it seems to max the CPU fairly quick.

edit: i'm still looking for an alternative to Peak, anyone know a good program to rip individual songs out of a 2hour mix?

The powerbook shares its FW bandwidth (i forget the proper term for it so that will do) between FW400 and 800 ports. Say if you are using your FW400 port with your HD daisy chained to your 002r, your going to be sharing the bandwidth between the two.

I you run one from the built in interface, and the other from a PCMCIA you effectively have full bandwidth for each device.

This would become a big issue when you have large track counts, I dont know if it would be a big deal as you have a max of 32 tracks, as it would depend on what sample rate you are using.

If only you could fold a Powermac in half to mac it portable

i use protools with a 1.25GHz powerbook and it works fine. benchmarks are not useful as all plugs stress the system a bit differently, but i can get good performance using mainly:
- mcdsp.com plugs
- ursplugins.com plugs
- pspaudioware.com plugs
- focusrite d2/d3
- waves renaissance & musicians bundle

two things... i like to use external reverbs as those sound more pleasing to my ear than the reverb plugs available to LE platform. that saves a lot of cpu for other processing. i also tend to do submixes as one needs to commit to something every now and then, which also saves a lot of cpu power but that's a trick one naturally cannot use within a live session. (i do live foh mixing with my protools rig, too)