For Apple fans, you’re looking at either a Mac Mini or iMac, although there are some caveats to consider. A progressively unreliable battery, the older screen and the greater CPU demands of modern plugins were making the experience less fun.It’s a sensible, grown up desktop computer that will happily serve you for many years to come. Upgrade the RAM and add another drive as soon as you can, and you could have a very capable studio machine on your hands.After almost seven years of intense use, it has slowly started to show its age. Organise your recording space with the best studio desks The best studio chairs: are you sitting comfortablyThe Mac mini 3.2GHz could very well serve as the hub of your studio, handling the bulk of your composition, recording, and mixing needs. This reduces the low-level hum produced by the computer considerably, making it good for recording environments. We particularly liked the all-in-one water-cooling feature, which cools the CPU using liquid as well as fans.Windows AlternativesFirst of all, let me state that I'm not an Apple fanboy, I'm perfectly happy with my Pixel 3a and several other Android phones before that. The main advantage you will find in this software is super-fast multitrack recording and MIDI.Unfortunately, the 2020 MacBook doesn't deal with any of these issues, but Intel’s 10th generation i5 and i7 Quad-Core processors, the possibility to expand the RAM to 16GB, and the impressive Retina display allowed me to let my old computer finally retire. Namely, the removal of the MagSafe and the SD card reader, as well as the limited number of USB ports.One of the big hitters of the recording world is Ableton Live.
Having dealt with Windows in the past, I can see their advantages, but Apple provides a seamless experience. I also love how stable and efficient MacOS is besides being a low-maintenance operating system. The integration of the touchpad and magic mouse gestures into Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro are an essential part of my workflow, anything else will be a compromise. 2020 UpdatesThe new Air comes standard with 256GB of fast SSD storage which is enough for me, since I prefer to keep the system drive relatively clean and work off an external SSD, especially with the large video files. A light, reliable and snappy computer with good battery life and silent operation is all I'm looking for. Except for video editing, none of my other activities requires a lot of CPU power. Furthermore, my work primarily involves recording and producing classical guitar or chamber music, writing articles, making scores and editing simple videos. The teardrop shape is more comfortable to type on and for the work that I typically do, and the slightly less weight can be an important factor for travelling and location work. Is there a google play music app for macThey allow for enough space to rest your wrists when writing, a big-enough trackpad, front-facing speakers (for the odd time that I might need to use them) and a full-sized keyboard. Some people find the slightly wider bezels old-fashioned when compare to competitive ultrabooks, but I think that they might have advantages. I usually leave everything open with loaded projects, and in that case, the more Ram the better.The "new" retina display is a delight to watch, with great colour reproduction and breathtaking resolution. Sibelius and Affinity Photo may also run in the background, ready for me to use at any moment. A typical daily scenario for me is to have a bunch of tabs open at any given time at three different browsers (Safari, Chrome and Brave) as well as having both Logic and Final Cut loaded with my latest project. I opted the i7 version for the extra processing power and future-proofing, Intel's 10th generation quad-core processor should be about four times faster than my old computer.Another welcome addition is the 16GB Ram option which boosts the multitasking capabilities of the MacBook. ![]() Then I decided to push the CPU harder. I started boosting performance on some of the plugins with oversampling, still, the fan was inaudible. I would often only run plugins at top quality only for the mixdown.After loading all the plugins, I started the playback, after a minute or so there was still no sign of fan spun. Some plugins have also oversampling capabilities, that boost performance with the expense of bigger CPU loads, which would make my MacBook surrender. If required, I might use a couple of iZotope's noise reduction plugins to remove any unwanted noise.My seven-year-old MacBook could handle a similar load but the plugins would drain the CPU, sometimes leading to System Overload warnings. On the master bus, the usual suspects are the Pro-L2 limiter, along with the 2CAudio Vector spatial image analysis and Youlean loudness meter plugins. Granted, the fan would sometimes resemble an aeroplane jet, but it was doable and my old MacBook still works like a charm after several years of such abuse. I started the playback on Logic, I tried to push the CPU with moderate oversampling and then I tried to stream a video on Safari, after a couple of seconds, I got a System Overload warning from Logic and the audio stopped so thankfully I didn't have to go through this emetic experience again.Large projects are not my regular tasks, but I have used the 2013 Air to successfully produce projects with more than thirty audio tracks, with a bunch of plugins on each one, CPU hungry emulations, and virtual instruments. I stopped everything and took an ibuprofen, a headache form all the chaos was started to kick in instead.I loaded a similar project at my old MacBook and tried to replicate the test. I let the video play for another minute to check if this would make the fan to spin faster, but no luck, the fan was audible but at a very comfortable level. My last test was to reproduce the same experiment with Chrome, and surely after half a minute or so, the fan kicked in, at a low speed. Computer For Recording Studio 1080P Footage FromThe Retina screen is a big improvement over the old display, with much greater colour depth and spectacular resolution. Editing was snappy and with some basic colour grading and a LUT applied, the playback was perfect. To get an idea on the performance improvements I loaded 1080p footage from my Fuji mirrorless camera. Video EditingIntel’s Iris Plus graphics should make the 2020 Air a charm to work for light video editing.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorAmanda ArchivesCategories |