Macbook Pro 17", or Mac Pro for recording setup?

[enharmonic]

Hello fellow TGP recordists!

The time has come for me to upgrade from my lowly G5 (7,3) to a Mac Pro. I am seduced by the lure of the Macbook Pro portability, but I'll be using a lot of VST's and plugs. Oddly enough, it would appear that i can get more machine for the money if I go tower...but at the expense of portability.

My application? I'm a singer/songwriter. I used to work as a recording engineer, and would eventually like to return to it. As such, I'm planning a Metric Halo front end, starting with the ULN-2 for my own work, and growing it to a few 2882's next year. I use Logic Pro.

I'd welcome your thoughts on the pro's and con's of going with a Macbook in lieu of the tower, or vice versa.

:dude

Rob

[PUCKBOY99]

I'm far from an expert, but I think you already answered your question......

Macbook = portability

Mac Pro = bigger bang for buck, power, storage, etc etc

Again, I know nothing...I just did a bunch of research while searching for my 1st Mac. I hear once you go Mac, you never go back ! ;)

Anyway, I'll be following this thread in hopes of learning :BEER

[shawntp]

I'd get the 17" MBP - Its a portable world now and that thing is a serious powerhouse and it has the real estate of 17" 1920x1200 which is perfect for logic.

I run Logic on a 13" MB into a 23" display (13" is too small and I used to have a 15" MBP and that was iffy on real estate). I am planing on getting the new 17" unibody this year.

Like the above post - I think the main thing with the Mac Pro is that you have more expandability option for drives/hardware/etc to setup a real powerful fixed audio workstation installation. The benefit of a MacBook Pro is that you have the ability to do location recording or work on the road.

If you are only doing a couple tracks at a time you wont even need an external drive on the MBP - but if you are doing more traditional multitrack recording of a full band or something then you would want external drives.

I love logic and I think that Apple overhauled it to make a really portable friendly application. I also think the new unibody macbook pro is one of the finest notebooks ever made.

There are lots of +/-'s that will float around but I think a lot in terms of Notebook-vs-Desktop conversation the two options just continue to get closer and closer as notebooks and outboard devices/interfaces continue to evolve. The main argument I see is just disk options but with all the large-cheap-fast firewire drive options I dont even notice.

[chickenbackside]

Depends on where portability is in your list of priorities.

If you can't see yourself always bringing your recording setup everywhere, go for the Mac Pro. There is simply no comparison in terms of power and upgradability. The PCI slots in the Mac Pro alone will make it worth it. Firewire devices don't even come near PCI devices' speed and stability.

4GB of RAM in a Macbook Pro ain't gonna cut it when things get heavy.

So it really depends on what you do.

A Macbook Pro wouldn't work for my music arrangement/recording/mixing applications (10-15 tracks of instrument plugins like Ivory Piano, SD2.0, EWQL Orchestra, Spectrasonics stuff...etc + 10-20 tracks of audio + video + automation + effects...etc).

But it'll work for a songwriter who runs a few tracks of instrument plugins and audio for sketching down ideas.

[hot lava mike]

I have a Mac Book Pro for home- when the weather's nice I can go outside and record- record on my couch, record in my bedroom, record at a friends' house etc...

I've even thought about recording our live shows with it...just don't want to bring into a bar.

My band uses another Mac Book Pro for demos- we run 15+ tracks with minimal plugins just fine. But these are just good sounding home demos.

If I had a dedicated studio and wanted to do commercially viable recordings and mixes- I'd probably go with a tower for all the reasons mentioned above.

[shawntp]

4GB of RAM in a Macbook Pro ain't gonna cut it when things get heavy.

The new 17" Unibody model will support up to 8GB of ram (the new $3300 8-core Mac Pro supports up to 32GB of ram - the $2500 Quad Core Mac Pro is 8GB max currently).

[lonejackrd]

It has been said. The MacBook if you demand portability. The Pro if you want super power -- especially the new model that got announced last week. One thing to really consider is how many tracks you want to record simultaneously. 1 or 2 tracks OK on MacBook. 8 tracks or more, you'll want to seriously consider a tower.
I use a tower most of the time but have had no problems running my 17" MacBook to do stereo tracking with Logic Pro, a ton of plug-ins and software instruments from NI (which are processing hogs). If you go with the MacBook, consider the Apogee Duet.

[retro]

It's a good question...

lol, I need both though.

I have a MacBook Pro, a Mac Pro and happen to use MH interface's. Both Mac's are 'very capable' in my experience. And the MH Interfaces are such a great piece of kit in many many ways.

For what I do, I sometimes need the MacBook Pro on location. Not only for audio, but video ingesting and editing on location. For audio I use VI's, lot's of plugs and a cab mic's for guitar tracks. But I've used it for tracking live bands also with 1-ULN-2 and 2-2282's. For video I've edited a full doc running a 30" ACD. The MacBook Pro's are really quite impressive. The current MacBook Pro with the new vid processor and battery makes it even more so.

The MacBook Pro for me has been helpful and paid for itself as a sale's tool for showing work to prospective clients and getting the job.


Difficult choice but I think it comes down to your need for location work. But the MacBook Pro's IME have plenty of power.

[Maxer]

Tower... more power.

Unless you're, say, a DJ using Ableton Live right off the floor in a live situation or a working musician who likes the ability to generate quick musical sketches while touring, in my opinion portability is over-rated. I'm using Logic too (along with GuitarRig and Ethno Instruments) and I'm a lowly home recording dude. Still, it's not unusual to have 10-12 tracks going at once, using all sorts of plug-ins. It's not so much the room for the extra drives in the tower (although that is important), it's the added processing crunch of more cores dedicated to your music production... things happen quicker. I'm working with a dual G5 2.3 tower with 4.5 Gb of RAM right now but my new tower will likely have 6... the more memory the faster your multiple cores will chew through your music-related processes.

A 17" display on a laptop would still bug me as it's too small for all the stuff I tend to use at once. I like driving two monitors. If you're using a MacBook Pro with an additional monitor, is it truly portable anymore?

Anyway, lots of good advice in this thread. Good luck with your decision. Cheers!

[enharmonic]

Thanks for all of the great feedback. Another wrinkle in the tower consideration is the Psystar "Hackintosh". Looks like a lot of bang for the buck...though if Apple slays the beast, I can forget hardware support in a year or two.

I'm spooked by the massive processing power of the new towers because that's what's essentially pushing me out of my G5. VST's are getting real heavy, and starting to take advantage of all of the processing power available. I fear that even the new Macbook could be maxed out in 3 years...which would put me right back into my current dilema.

Anyone ever rack a tower for live work? :D

[chickenbackside]

Anyone ever rack a tower for live work? :D
Yup. It's a pain to setup compared with a laptop. But talk about power and speed...

[retro]

I was filming a 6 piece jazz band last night.

The AE on the shoot was running about 20 tracks live on a MacBook Pro through his Digi gear, API's and TubeTech, etc.

That's a fairly common sight for me around here.

I know towers are 'more powerful' but it's not really that apparent in use 'IME'.

My 8 Core can seem slow too. lol.