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Creating, performing and producing music has never been easier or more affordable. If you own one of the best laptops for music production, with a few small steps, you can have access to a variety of technologies after maintaining a professional studio. From all the “tape in a box” tools to multi-player recording environments, it’s amazing what you can do with a consumer-grade laptop now.
The Best Laptops For Music Production
We think it’s a great hobby and want to share it. In this guide, we’ll cover some tips for choosing a laptop for playing and creating music in your home recording studio. Read on to learn everything from the features you need to how you can optimize it for recording, as well as advice on specific details to consider when choosing a laptop for recording music.
Tips For Choosing A Laptop For Music Production
Our team of expert musicians and producers spend long hours testing products to help you choose the best instrument for creating music. Learn more about what we tested.
When you are choosing a laptop for recording music, there are some things you need to get the laptop. Chief among them is pure, no-nonsense performance. Fancy features like branded speakers, touchscreens or 4K resolution are nice, but they’re not essential for a music-making laptop. Here it’s all about your CPU, RAM and storage environment. Each of these components dictates how much you can do and how quickly you can do it.
The CPU controls how fast your laptop runs and how many of these things it can do at once. Virtual tools, plugins, and other processing tasks all use the CPU, and you’ll quickly find that things will grind to a halt if your CPU isn’t up to the task at hand. An Intel Core i5 and up, or an AMD Ryzen 5 and up, should give you enough juice to handle most tasks.
RAM controls how much data is stored in the laptop’s short-term memory. This is reflected in how many audio tracks you can have in your arrangement or how many individual samples you can use. Ideally you’ll want up to 8GB here. Anything less and you’ll find that working with digital audio workstations (DAWs) can be a difficult experience. It’s also worth considering whether it can be improved in the future, it’s simple enough, but it has a big impact on performance.
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Finally, storage media is probably the most important of the three factors we’ve mentioned, but it’s definitely one to consider. Although traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) can store large amounts of files and data, they are not fast enough to get that data where it is needed. For this purpose, you should look for solid state drives (SSD) that offer high data transfer speeds. So, for example, you can save large sample libraries and transfer them to your DAW without errors or other problems.
Ah, finance, cruel lady. While we all want to identify the awesome Apple MacBook Pro, there are certain economic realities that most of us have to face. That’s why it’s important to have an idea of how much you want to spend before you go shopping online. Our guide to choosing a budget laptop at the lower end of the range shows some great options, but as with everything, you get what you pay for. For us, the jump in performance once you pass the $/£500 mark makes this the sweet spot for a basic machine suitable for music production.
As we mentioned above, you need to consider what you will be using the laptop for. If it is bought for the sole purpose of making music, pay attention to the specifications. Spend most of your hard-earned dollars in the way of CPU, RAM, and storage media, and ignore those nice headline features. The touchscreen and aesthetics are great, but not at the expense of performance.
If possible, choose SSDs over HDDs, and in terms of connectivity, ensure that peripherals and external devices such as MIDI keyboards and audio interfaces are USB-compatible in the future. C will be converted, so make sure you have a good backup on it. those areas.
Best Laptops (2023): Macbooks, Windows, Chromebooks
Also, consider battery life. Although many studios have laptops installed in a static location, the benefits of portability cannot be underestimated. Throwing your entire studio setup into your backpack and working on the beach or in the mountains, for example, is a liberating experience that you can’t do with a desktop computer.
The relationship between hardware and software in music production is intertwined. A laptop is only as good as the software it runs, and the software is only as good as what it allows the laptop to run. Apple has a clear advantage here in that Logic Pro X, its proprietary DAW, is specifically designed to work only with Apple’s operating system and thus has a distinct performance boost. All this, in short, just works.
And Windows-based laptops have a huge selection to choose from, including Ableton Live, Cubase and AVID Pro Tools, each with their own pros and cons. Aside from Apple apps, any good laptop should be able to handle projects in any major DAW. This leaves you with another decision, which we will discuss here.
It’s wise to ask how long you expect to be away from your laptop. Technology is moving very fast these days and it is always easy to compete to have the fastest and most powerful car. It’s important to consider whether the laptop you choose can upgrade you in the future.
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Windows-based machines, especially gaming domain machines, often allow the user to upgrade individual components such as RAM or storage without much difficulty. Music production is still possible on older computers, but using the techniques described here.
While the laptop itself is the heart of the operation, there are other components you’ll want to add to get the most out of the technology. Using the audio processing capabilities of a laptop, an audio interface allows you to connect audio inputs – instruments and microphones – to audio outputs such as studio monitors and headphones.
Likewise, peripherals like controller keyboards and boxes like Native Instruments’ Maschine can expand your device’s capabilities. USB acts as a gateway here, so you’ll need to make sure you either have enough connections inside the laptop or that the transmitter in question can work through the hub – not all transmitters will work, so be sure to research this beforehand.
Audio driver compatibility is important in music production. Most audio hardware and software you use will work using ASIO drivers for audio, which can be a mixed bag depending on your laptop. When working properly, they allow for low-latency recording and performance, which means instant feedback about what you’re playing and what the laptop is hearing. If they don’t, they can be a nightmare full of pops, cracks, bugs, and timing issues.
Best Music Production Laptops In 2023
In our experience, Apple excels at drivers that require no effort or thought. Windows, on the other hand, can be tricky and sometimes requires a bit of forum digging to resolve certain issues. That’s fine—useful, even—if you’re hands-on with computers but the thought of fiddling with settings gives you the chills, here’s what platform to choose.
As with any major purchase, our advice is simple. Determine what you want to achieve and start determining what is important, what is a “nice to have” and what you can live without. For a hobbyist who wants to do some composing and recording while doing normal laptop tasks like email and video calling, a Windows machine with the features we discussed earlier will do just fine. For the serious or more advanced user, we refer you to a high-end Windows laptop such as the Dell XPS range or the Apple ecosystem with the MacBook Pro.
For us, music production is one of the most rewarding ways to express your creativity. The technology we choose to work with should work silently in the background, allowing us to do our work without ever being the center of attention. By doing your research – as you are – and making the right choice, you should get a laptop that will serve you well for the foreseeable future.
Chris Corfield is a journalist with over 12 years experience writing for the world’s biggest music brands including Orange Amplification, Guitar World Total Guitar and Dawsons Music. From guitars and basses to synthesizers, microphones, DJ equipment and music production equipment, Chris loves to tinker.
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