Logic Pro X system

[roadkill401]

I have a large iMac 27" but that really is not all the portable. I am not by any means a pro musican or producer of any sort. I am just a hack who wants to have some fun making up music for my own pleasure.

I have a few friends that we get together and jam (or our version of it) and I was interested more in feeding it into a mac via Logic Pro X as I can't seem to wrap my head around garage band. I come from an IT background and worked with CAD software and Video Editiong / Animation when I was younger.

I need to get a more portable mac that I can bring with me along with my midi keyboard, mixer and stuff to capture the jams and see if I can make it into something more fun. Now I am tempted to get a used MacBookPro late 2014 i5 as there are quite a few of them getting sold used now. They range in price here in Canada from $700-1000. I think a new MacBookPro coast in the $1700+ The thought is that I could just setup that macbook as being the LogicProX machine, and once setup and working, I never need to update it or mess around with it. Dedicated.

Another option is to pick up a cheep mac mini 2012 i5 as they can be gotten for around the $350. and with a bit of investment of time and IT skill upgrade to 16gb and replace the hd with a second SSD. it would be a few bucks cheeper than a MacBookPro but not nearly as portable and easy to setup.

The other option is to just get something as cheep as possible. Who cares if it can even run LogicProX. just enough to run garage band and use that with the bare of minimum, then plan to taking whatever mess I have and bringing it back to the iMac that is big, powerful and more than able to handle enything thrown at it. Then use that to do everything.


I am looking to know what is a realistic requirement for a mac to run Logic Pro X? will a 2014 macbook pro work? would a mac mini work to do actual editing? How much ram do you really need? I will likely be using recordings along with midi and external sound plugins. Lets be honest, there is quite a bit of cool stuff out there and I won't limit myself right out of the gate.

What realistically do you need?

 

[Howard2k]

If you're just recording audio, it's not overly taxing. If you're using software instruments (I don't) it's far heavier on the CPU.

I typically record three tracks in Garageband - L&R from backing audio and a guitar track, and the CPU on my 2015 13" barely budges. The only time the CPU is hammered is if I'm transcoding my recorded audio. Exporting an hour of WAV to AAC for archive takes a few minutes. I'm not sure if you're taking about the 13" or 15", bur the 13" 2014 isn't hugely different from what I use. The 2014 15" is a quad core I believe, so would be far more powerful. There may be GPU concerns on the 15", I'm not totally sure.

I'm good with the 13" and anticipate that I will be for a few more years, perhaps with the exception of a battery replacement. If I was buying today and if I didn't need to regularly put my MacBook in a backpack I think the 2015 15" is good value on the used market (without dGPU). I would certainly consider a 13" too but for 2014 or 2015 I wouldn't pay too much. I have one and it's great, but it's far weaker than the newer 2.3Ghz / 2.4Ghz 13"s.