[steamy]

I want to set up a portable recording "studio" and I am considering getting a mac laptop
I have a few considerations you might be able to help with, perhaps.
-Which Power Book or Mac Book will be the best for audio processing?
-Will I need a USB or Firewire interface? I presume so. Which would you recommend and why?
Many Thanks
Steamy

[fisherKing]

hey, just answered your '2button mouse' question on periphs forum!

you can do audio on any late-gen or new macbook (or pro);
i'm using a 12" G4 (with logic&reason, and USUALLY audio files on a firewire drive).

just bump up the ram (2gigs is good).

i;m using a usb interface; firewire is good, but watch out for the # of ports on the 'book
(ie one FW400 and onefw800 means u could use the 400 for audio, the 800 for an external drive);
older mac laptops only have the one FW port.

m-audio makes great interfaces, as does edirol.

google a bit for more info as well!

have fun..

[steamy]

Thanks again,

So if I get it right, that would be laptop
+FW harddrive
+FW interface
+more RAM

Would you recon streaming audio from USB harddrive (USB2.0) would be as good?
I have USB harddisk already.

[analogika]

I depends upon your needs.

Firewire is better at streaming large amounts of timing-critical data.

For most purposes, you're probably going to be just fine with a MacBook with 2GB RAM, a Firewire interface and a USB hard drive (or recording to the internal drive).

If, for example, you're going to be doing mostly live tracking with 40+ channels, you're probably going to want to go with a MacBook Pro and add a second Firewire bus via an ExpressCard to keep the FW audio interface and the FW hard drive on separate busses.

Other than the expandability via Firewire 800 and the card slot, there is no real difference in audio performance between the MacBook and the MacBook Pro (beyond the expected gain due to the slightly higher clock frequencies in the Pros). If the MacBook, I would go with the 2GHz Core 2 Duo models, though, since the 4MB cache on those processors does increase audio performance.

2GB RAM should be enough for most things, though.