Macbook for Live Music

[MarkW19]

Ah, ok. I wouldn't trust it myself, if only for interference from the other components inside the laptop. Plus adapters and converters isn't exactly a great signal chain. Then again, I'm concentrating more on studio work than live work. I too will be using the computer to make all my music, I just feel that an external audio interface is a vastly superior soundcard to the one that will come in any laptop. Let me know how you get on though, i'll be interested to know what it's like.

I'm hoping it'll be ok, no ground loop problems etc. Plus, the less kit I can take out live, the better.

Also, I assumed the latency would be better on the internal soundcard - no third party drivers, all fully integrated with Logic etc., Apple have full control over it.

Also, with Apple deciding to put an optical input/output on there (ie taking audio seriously on the machine), I assumed they'd at least have done a reasonable job on it.

 

[Lewk]

I'm hoping it'll be ok, no ground loop problems etc. Plus, the less kit I can take out live, the better.

Also, I assumed the latency would be better on the internal soundcard - no third party drivers, all fully integrated with Logic etc., Apple have full control over it.

Also, with Apple deciding to put an optical input/output on there (ie taking audio seriously on the machine), I assumed they'd at least have done a reasonable job on it.

Well, like I say I will definitly be interested to know how it is. Though personally I would trust apple to make a great laptop, and I would trust an audio company to make a great audio card. Latency problems are pretty minimal through firewire, if not zero latency. I think the fact that apple sell audio interfaces through their store speaks volumes. If the MBP does have a good audio card in it then the extra cost becomes a lot more justifiable to me, as I will have to spend £200 on top of my MB to get really decent audio. If I was a graphics professional I would have gone for the MBP straight away.

of course it still all depends on the user. At work, in the studio, we need an audio interface with 24 inputs, because we record many microphones at once.

 

[ipo]

well , true

I'm going for the Focusrite Saffire LE Firewire interface myself.

Well that's quite right ...i don't know which one to buy ... i'll check this one as well .. i was going for some M-audio stuff.. maybeee Apogee if sufficient
funds. BUT on the go ..i'm listening through the MacBook's audio out .. so ...
that's like .. a big time .
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Saffire,Dude, this is some sweeeeet tech !

 

[Lewk]

Well that's quite right ...i don't know which one to buy ... i'll check this one as well .. i was going for some M-audio stuff.. maybeee Apogee if sufficient
funds. BUT on the go ..i'm listening through the MacBook's audio out .. so ...
that's like .. a big time .
----------
Saffire,Dude, this is some sweeeeet tech !

That saffire seems perfect for me. I do quite a bit of location recording (of acoustic ensembles, usually just a stereo pair), currently to minidisk, which is fine but if I could record straight to the laptop it would be much more useful, and the reviews of the saffire are great, they say the pre-amps are brilliant for the price. I think for project studio work it is a great buy. Obviously I don't know for sure as I don't own it yet, but Sound on Sound are usually correct for me! I think they key for audio interfaces is to really think what you need, and I mean *need*, not desire, and then do a lot of research. it's very easy to get an audio interface that does far more than is necessary for a home studio but will be lacking in a useful feature. The mackie onyx satellite nearly had me sold until I realised it didn't have a midi in/out because i forgot about it.

 

[qsoundrich]

Get an external audio card, even if it's just a simple little USB device. The internal sound processing on the Macbook sounds like garbage. I got a turtle beach amigo and it's night and day difference between the headphone out and the card.

 

[NewbieNerd]

Yeah I'll definitely get a good audio interface... haven't decided if I should pony up for the Apogee Duet or not, also considering I'd have to pony up another $40 or so for a USB/MIDI adapter. I don't know anything about this DAW stuff yet, but I'm pretty committed to it, so I guess I better get the good stuff, MBP included.

On a side note, maybe I should ask it in the Digital Audio forum or something, but for live performance with MainStage, do I put the interface and Mac in front of my amp, or in the effects loop? And then when just recording, should I just mic my amp (it's a good Mesa Boogie Express 5:50, so I'd probably want to use it) or can you just use the send of the effects loop and record from there? I'm not sure where the effects loop is in the grand scheme of the amp, or even what the components of a signal going through an amp even are, hehe, so I'm guessing either I don't use the amp or I mic it.

 

[Golcondio]

I've been playing live music with my laptop for a year or so. I play bass, guitar and some synths, therefore I need good converters (both on the A/D and on the D/A side), good quality preamps and a good deal of outputs: I chose a MoTU Ultralite, which isn't cheap, but holds the best quality/price ratio out there (if you can tell the difference in comparison with a 200 euro M-audio... some people can't, and they're surely happier than me, since they can settle with much less...).
I noticed that my old, faithful Toshiba M40-281 was my real bottleneck, both power-wise AND especially OS-wise (to smoothly run ASIO drivers you must mainly assign resources to background tasks, but that means that opening a window causes gaps in the audio as the CPU switches... completely unacceptable!). I also noticed that a friend of mine, with the same audio interface and a MBP, managed to seamlessly run Ableton Live, Reason AND fool around a bit with Exposé just to piss me off! Never a single hiccup!
What did I do?
I just ordered my refurb MBP (the basest model, which still rocks), bought 4Gb of RAM from www.buydifferent.it ! Now I'll just have to wait and pawn off the windoze machine to some sucker