Road Warriors- portable laptop users?

[dcoscina]

I brought this up in another thread. I'm curious to see if anyone else has a portable rig for composing outside the studio or home. I have a Dell Laptop P4 with 1 gig RAM that has Overture 4.01, Sonar 4, EWQLSO Silver and Gold (soon to be Gold Pro XP ), Kontakt 2, and Edirol SuperQuartet all controlled by an Edirol PC-1. I think it's a fantastic little set-up and can easily compete with my desktop PC in terms of power and performance.

How about anyone else?

[Doug Rogers]

Originally Posted by dcoscina

I brought this up in another thread. I'm curious to see if anyone else has a portable rig for composing outside the studio or home. I have a Dell Laptop P4 with 1 gig RAM that has Overture 4.01, Sonar 4, EWQLSO Silver and Gold (soon to be Gold Pro XP ), Kontakt 2, and Edirol SuperQuartet all controlled by an Edirol PC-1. I think it's a fantastic little set-up and can easily compete with my desktop PC in terms of power and performance.

How about anyone else?

The main problem with laptops is they mostly have slow hard drives in them for heat reasons (usually 5400rpm). The solution is to use an external Firewire 800 (not 400) drive, that will provide additional storage space, better streaming performance, get the samples off the same drive as the software (which is recommended), and is still very portable.

- Doug

[Tmon]

I have a prostar Pentium 4 3ghz with a 1.5gigs of ram and a seperate firewire drive. I'm using Sonar and Kontakt 2 controled by a midiman oxygen 8. I bought the laptop about 2 years ago and it has been rock solid. I don't quite get the same performance as my 3 machine setup in my studio, but it works great at home.

-T

[dcoscina]

Interesting. I do have a Lacie firewire harddrive that's currently running of my desktop but I suppose I could use it with my laptap. I actually haven't encountered any problems using the internal harddrive thus far although I honestly haven't loaded up too many instances of Gold.

Aside from my Kong Symphonic Poem, most of the pieces I'm working on are small to medium ensembles so I don't need a gazillion intruments. I also honestly like the challenge of creating a full sound with smaller resources. Goldsmith did this all the time when he was working in television in the '50s and '60s. I think he's a good model to follow in this regard.

And for classical, I refer to Franz Shreker's Chamber Symphony which is amazingly colorful and rich.

[Doug Rogers]

Originally Posted by dcoscina

Interesting. I do have a Lacie firewire harddrive that's currently running of my desktop but I suppose I could use it with my laptap.

It's important that it is Firewire 800 and not 400.

- Doug

[dcoscina]

Originally Posted by Doug Rogers

It's important that it is Firewire 800 and not 400.

- Doug

Hmmm, I'll have to check. I've been running it via USB2 and haven't had any issues to speak of. But then again, I have only run up to 2 or 3 instances of Gold on my machine. But never to any ill effect. However, my laptop does have the Firewire port and obviously it's the better way to go.

[neoTypic]

I'm using a laptop with an Intel Pentium M (1.85), 2 gigs of RAM, and a ATA WD HD in an external enclosure connected via Firewire.

I'm still getting some kinks worked out of my setup sooo..... *crosses fingers*

[zerostudios]

When I'm on the road, I use my Apple PowerBook (1.67ghz), with all my sound libraries on a LaCie FW 800 drive. Using Kontakt 2 and Logic EXS 24 with lots of EW libs, Stylus, VSL, Atmosphere. Works great but I can't get nearly the polyphony of my G5. Freeze and offline bouncing gets the job done, though!

Michael
www.zerostudios.com

[sinkd]

Originally Posted by Doug Rogers

...get the samples off the same drive as the software (which is recommended), ...

- Doug

I guess I've been doing this wrong. Should I move my EastWest folder out of Applications and onto my samples drive? Will this screw up any authorizations? Should I also move Kontakt, which is what I use mostly to load my templates?

Got a little time to kill while I load up PRO XP!

Love the new instrument organization folders btw. Great idea.
Thanks.

DS

[JRTrumpet]

Greetings,

From what I've read, it seems the best to be running all of your applications on 1 drive, and the samples on a separate drive...in your case, keeping the EW applications on your internal drive while only running samples from the external. I'm actually grappling with this right now...i'm tempted to keep everything (the samples and the program) on the external hard drive.

As far as authorization goes....

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but our EW sounds are authorized through the Native Instruments software. When NI authorizes sounds, it authorizes the system that you're using...this means that (and I think i've tried it with success) if you move everything to an external hard drive, then it will work...however, if you plug that hard drive into another system, it won't run because you haven't authorized the sounds...i've called up NI about this issue, since I want to take my sounds from my studio to other studios to run demos.

Josh Roach