--- weaviestonder <weaviestonder@hotmail.it> wrote:
A couple of more question for Mark:
1. how much RAM would you say a laptop would need to
function as a
looper? Can you give me a frame of reference?
I think they say on the Mobius site that 1 gig of
memory is a good amount to have (and many laptops come
with at least 1 gig these days), but my laptop came
with 2 slots and if you get it custom configured one
of those slots was filled with a 1 gig chip. A second
1 gig chip for $150 brought me to 2 gigs. I got this
to be more safe and run sampler software. When I had
1 gig of RAM I was able to get Live and a bunch of
instruments and effects running perfectly. I've
always figured it's best to bring your machine up to
the highest specs you can afford though. Makes them
last longer.
2. is software for Mac less functional than that on
PC?
Not by nature, but in this case Mobius is XP only.
Can XP apps, including Mobius run on a new Mac? Yes.
If I had unlimited cash and wasn't impatient, I'd have
waited and gotten a Macbook Pro. However, I had a
budget and I was able to get exactly what I wanted
with a Toshiba laptop. Is Windows XP a bizarre,
clunky, annoying, pestery security nightmare? Yes.
However, once you reconfigure it and keep it off the
web it works just as well. (but man is it ugly
compared to the Mac OS!) If you go XP, plan on giving
yourself a week of tweaking time to get it running for
music. My Mac G5 was good to go out of the box.
I was planning
to get a Mac, since I have heard from many people
that they are more
reliable than computers (no crashes, etc), which is
a big deal when you
are performing live obviously.
Again, as long as you learn how to take care of a
Windows box, they're pretty damn stable. The one time
Live 5 crashed on me Mobius kept going and responding
to MIDI messages. In a performance situation this
would have given me plenty of time to fade my loops,
starting a new one using my Vox Tonelab so I could do
a reboot and continue seamlessly. Also, I was doing
something fairly stupid when it crashed, like adding
VSTis while a sequence was running. Not something I'd
do in a performance.
Also, they told me
most PCs have longer
delay in handling MIDI signal (sorry this
explanation is poor but my
English is insufficient here).
Again, I don't think MIDI latency is much of an issue
in any new machine with a USB interface.
3. If I chose to get a Mac, would the hardware
requirements be
different? I mean, would I need more or less RAM or
more or less CPU to
do the same thing?
I know when Mac was using the G5 chip there was not a
direct way to compare clock speed. Often a PC needed
as much as twice the clock to run the same app
according to Reaktor 5's box. I know a lot of how an
app runs on any OS depends on how it's optimized. I
find a lot of apps that are Mac only work really well
(Like Digital Performer) but others like Live run
better because to cut corners they're not fully
optimized for the Mac OS. I think this got corrected
in Live 5 though, but I only run that on the laptop.
Thank you all very much again, it's great to get to
talk to people who
have experience in this field and are willing to
share it and so patient
in talking to a newbie! :)
You're on what I consider by far to be the best music
list. Enjoy! I don't know why, but loopers seem to
be the most knowledgeable and helpful people on this
planet. Good luck, you're about to learn a very fun
way to make music.
Mark
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