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You made the best choice I believe.

Not too much power because you'll never make a song with more than 20-30 layers and every Mac shipping can handle that plus any effects.

Anything more would be for gamers or graphic designers.

Always go for the largest screen you can afford. Anything under 17" is compromising. 17" is just as overall portable as the 13". Anybody tells you otherwise doesn't understand the word portable. Saying portable when they mean ultra-hyper-portable. Every laptop is portable because it's not a desktop tower and has a built in monitor. Carrying a 13 or carrying a 17 is the same thing for all intents and purposes. Before you own a 17 you see it as this mythical splurge option that is too much but after you own one you can't possibly ever get a smaller screen.

The 15 is cool.

No matter what you chose it was gonna be a more than powerful enough system for your needs.

Now just get the Waves bundle mastering software which is 10,000$. 4 times as much as the computer and just as essential to getting that nice high quality modern sound. Good luck. You're not gonna make it btw :)

The industry no longer exists except as a myth.
 
I usually lurk, but joined just to comment here. I have been producing and composing I'm logic for the past 3 yrs. I recently upgraded to the 2.2 quad. It is a beast, I am glad to hear u chose the 2.0 quad instead of the 13".

I am currently composing pretty big orchestral sessions that just wouldn't be possible with a dual core. And yes, get an external hard drive for your samples, and one for your audio recording.

Anyways, just wanted to chime in, you made the right choice going with the quad.
 
I have a 15" C2D and my wife has a 13" uMB. Get the 15", even with the external monitor. You'll definitely see the lack of screen real estate, and using Logic, you'll want that.
 
Ok fokes,

New plan:
13" mbp i7 -> amazon.de (much cheaper!)
+ Optibay hack, move the 7200rpm 500gb hdd (which is in my current laptop) in that
+ custom bought 128gb SSD

So, the only thing is, which brand/type ssd is safe to buy, in terms of compatibility?

Logic Express 9 runs just fine on my Laptop: AL_uMB 2.4Ghz C2D, 250GB HDD (5400rpm upgraded to 7200rpm), 4GB RAM. At a training class the same app ran significantly faster with the outgoing 15" MBP 2.53 Corei5 (Still a dual-core cpu). Given that machine had a 7200rpm with 16/32GB cache that did help … I've narrowed that lead.

The key to your expected performance will be the CPU & RAM, SSD will help but with the current sizes and pricing (about $400CAN for a 256GB internal) you'll still require using external HDD/SSD solution for the most of your heavy project work.

Get the newer MBP's as you've already decided.
Don't spend on an Optibay hack … unless most of your composition, editing will be on the road (most still don't do this).
Use an external display if going with 13" when at home.
Recommended external HDD … LaCie Little Big Disk (Dual & RAID SSD) which will use the ThunderBolt port :D.

^ that my friend is the winning solution. I'll be with you this summer going full out.

Curious which music are you composing/editing or doing live with.
 
http://www.gearspace.com/board/music-computers/371545-logic-pro-multicore-benchmarktest-55.html

This was a post at gearslutz

"Quad core 2.2 MacBook Pro with 4GB Ram, using logic 9.1.3:

32 Bit: 72 Tracks
64 Bit: 83 Tracks

I'm going to see how I can get by with 4G RAM for now, I want to upgrade the ram and do the SSD/Optibay at the same time in the future to add another bump to this already beast of a machine."

These track count numbers puts it squarely in the perfomance range of the 2009/2010 MacPros which wre no slouches as DAWs To have this powere on the go is amazing. While I loved my 2010 MBP 2.66. It did everything well but audio perfomance was suprisingly lacking. Quad core sandybridge changes this and makes the MBP a legitimate remote/portable DAW solution

Yeah, sorry but those benchmarks are not a measurement of real world usage.
I've participated in the Gearslutz community for years and years (same username) and people there are well meaning but the benchmark process doesn't replicate how you actually use the machine in the course of your usual day.
Also most of the benchmarks are done on brand new machines, not one that has had a couple of OS updates applied, loads of apps and data installed on them.

I ran with my 17" for just over 12 months and I found it ultimately frustrating.
It would work pretty well if I shut down all other apps but you would occasionally get Core Audio overload messages.
Using firewire drives for live recording was not the best solution so I had to resort to using the internal drive to record audio to.
Recording audio to the internal drive that has the boot OS on it isn't ideal.
What I do with the Mac Pro is have separate drives for the OS, audio recording and sample archive/plugin data.
It really is the best way to run a system.

I am not saying you CAN'T use a portable to run a studio, just that I tried it for a year, tried all the available options/approaches we had at the time and ultimately it didn't work for me.
Maybe the hobbiest community are a bit more tolerant of the downside but when I have clients/bands/artists here I need to be able to press Record and it all has to work immediately.
All this is IMHO of course.
 
http://www.gearspace.com/board/music-computers/371545-logic-pro-multicore-benchmarktest-55.html

These track count numbers puts it squarely in the perfomance range of the 2009/2010 MacPros which wre no slouches as DAWs To have this powere on the go is amazing. While I loved my 2010 MBP 2.66. It did everything well but audio perfomance was suprisingly lacking. Quad core sandybridge changes this and makes the MBP a legitimate remote/portable DAW solution
Were those track counts on the stock 5400 drive?

Recently, in my local Guitar Center, while waiting for a salesperson, I found their Macbook Pro station. I tried launching Logic (Pro, IIRC) on that and it took 20 sec to launch. I don't know what HD they have but I suspect it was not an SSD. I suspect an SSD would take probably around 1/10th that time.
 
I too am building a DAW. I narrowed my choices down to either A-DATA S599 (256gb) and Intel 320 (300gb) (thread: SATA II: ADATA S599 vs 320).

Bing'd and found: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paging

It's your DAW, not the OS that's going to be accessing different areas of the disk THAN the OS at the same time. How the OS manages disk access internally won't help because this fact.

Why it is unreliable to have the audio files on the same drive as the swap file? Why do I need two drives?

As above.

Why is a 7200rpm drive a better than SSD? Please explain.

It isn't, it's cheaper than 2 SSDs and depends on your preference.

A large, fast 7200rpm drive (internal SATA or external Firewire) would handle your requirments in a recording drive and leave plenty of space on a second partition for your general files like iTunes, photos etc... while having very fast application loading and booting because the OS would be running off an SSD.

The recording drive would HAVE to be 7200rpm because 5400 wouldn't have the throughput or access time for multi-track recording and even then the drive would be far more efficient of it was partitioned (You'd want you're general files stored on a second partition of the hard drive and audio files recording to the fastest partition on the same drive).

EG, if you had a 500Gb, 7200rpm drive to record to, it might be partitioned like this:

500Gb Drive Partition 1: 100Gb Recording Drive
500Gb Drive Partition 2: 400Gb Storage (iTunes libarary, general storage)
SSD: Macintosh HD (OS and Applications only)

I don't have an SSD to boot from personally but it's always a good idea to have your drives partitioned partitioned for efficiency because conventional hard drives slow down as they fill up so if you're only filling up 1 part of 1 drive while the OS has it's only drive/partiton and your DAW has it's own drive/partition, it's far more efficient.

My system is setup like this:

disk 1: 250Gb Drive Partition 1: 70Gb Macintosh HD
disk 1: 250Gb Drive Partition 2: 180Gb Storage (general files)

Then I have my recording drive on the same bus as the DVD (Because it's an old desktop with ATA, not SATA and avoids the problem of sharing the same ATA channel as the system drive)

disk 3: DVD
disk 2: 120Gb Recording drive

And then how do you read DVDs? An external DVD drive?

Yep. Most software is downloaded these days anyway and as far as I know, intel based macs can boot from any attached USB drive, even USB memory sticks so an external DVD would be fine. I doubt you'd even need the offical Apple one from the Macbook air because it's all the same to the OS.

What about using the SDXC card slot?
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3553

I don't know how reliable it would be for multi-track recording. I'd guess it's more for photos and stuff like that.

I asked about this last week back but got 0 useful replies. See: SSD For MBP?
 
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