How to Buy a Laptop Computer for Recording Purposes

Buying a laptop for the purposes of recording music or speech isn't really all that different than buying a laptop for any other purpose. As with any purchase, you want to make sure that the computer has the components and features you need to make it do what you want it to do. For recording purposes, there are a handful of configuration options that you want to look for in a laptop computer.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

1. Look for a good quality laptop. A ridiculously inexpensive or poorly made computer isn't likely stand up to frequent use (of any kind), and is unlikely to have the higher end configuration needed for recording audio. Purchase a brand that you know and that has a good reputation.

2. Purchase a laptop with 80 gigabytes or more of hard disk space. Most audio recording software captures audio as raw, headerless audio or uncompressed .wav files, of which the size can be quite large. For example, recording a song with 8 mono tracks in .wav format would be roughly 225 megabytes simply for the unmixed audio. Using stereo tracks for each part increases the file size to about 450 megabytes and doesn't even take into account the "virtual" tracks that most recording software uses to save previous takes and for edits.

3. Buy a laptop with at least 1 gigabyte of RAM, or upgrade the RAM after purchase. Audio recording software needs to keep a lot of data in memory, and getting a machine with plenty of RAM will help avoid unnecessary disk reads and writes during recording or playback. If you can afford more RAM than 1 GB, get more.

4. Get the fastest processor that you can afford. Audio recording applications are taxing to the processor. Buy a machine with plenty of processing power to avoid dropouts or noises in the recorded audio, or poor performance of the software.

5. Look for a laptop with many USB 2.0 ports. Modern pro audio sound interfaces use either USB 2.0 or Firewire for a connection to the computer. Having numerous USB ports ensures that you can plug your interface directly into the computer and still have extra ports into which you can plug other peripherals. If you have a Firewire audio interface, get a laptop with a firewire port, or buy a PCMCIA card to give you the Firewire interface.

Tips & Warnings

• Remember that each stereo track that you record can be 50 megabytes or more for an average length pop song. Mono tracks would be half of the size of a stereo track, but multiply quickly considering that on a multitrack recording system, each instrument, voice, or part gets at least one mono or stereo track. As the number of tracks increases, so does the total file size.

[arianacherry99]

on 8/15/2008 this is very interesting information. Thanks for the write :)

[acole]

on 7/16/2008 Excellent information. Thank you!