Suggest a laptop for me!

[l Thomas l]

Number 1 reason for getting it is Serato. I don't need hardware power for anything else. I just need to maintain the low latency of Serato.

I'm gonna keep this one extra clean. I'll barely ever go online with it.

At first I was thinking:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/app...913283&Sku=G153-MX6956

But then there's no Core 2 Duo.

This one has Core 2 Duo, but not enough storage:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/app...bx2v3rjnxm145&GSCID=10

I'm gonna use it for Serato so I gotta have the music library on the laptop. An external hard drive (I have two) would be connected by USB so it would slow down Serato since the interface uses USB. I could use Firewire but that would probably still slow it down a little.

So then there's this one:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/app...bx2v3rjnxm145&GSCID=10
2GB Core 2 Duo
2GB RAM
160 GB HD
That's all I need to know. It's kinda expensive though. I wasn't

Should I just get a MacBook and not worry about any of this?

Another thing: They all have XP Media Center. I've heard this is terrible for anything. I have XP Pro, but I don't think it has another install left on it, cuz I think something accidently happened a long time ago. Since I don't do updates, since this laptop will barely go online, and since M$ is a piece of shit (Bill Gates has now even moved to the business of raping Africa and infecting their food supply), should I just "accidently find XP Home or Pro installed"??

 

[zig3695]

this is one of the most confusing posts ive seen in a long while. misinformed, misguided, bias, and plain untrue.

Serato looks like some sort of music authoring software. are you sure you want to run that on a laptop?

and, windows XP media center is just XP home with some extra media features. why would that be terrible for anything?

i dont know bill personally, but i would find it hard to believe he is raping anybody, especially africa. how about you lookup how much money that guy has donated to needy people then come back and continue to trash his reputation?

 

[TheStu]

let's start off by finding out exactly what Serato is. I agree with Zig (ain't that a first 🙂 ) that you are incredibly misinformed about the current situation.

The only Serato I could find online that was software, and that was some sort of DJ software it appears, is this at all correct?

An external Firewire or eSATA drive would suffice for your storage needs, including the bandwidth concerns that you have. USB is significantly less bandwidth than FireWire or eSATA, and so you are correct to a degree that it might cause some stutter in your audio program.

The only reason I would recommend a MacBook is because it is one of the few laptops out there that actually has a 6pin FireWire port as opposed to the usual 4pin mini port that most every other laptop out has, if they have FireWire at all. I am unsure if there are any limitations to using 4pin FireWire over 6pin, and I would suspect that any that there may be are power related as opposed to bandwidth related, so it may be fine.

As Zig pointed out, Media Center is just another flavor of XP, and post SP2, they are all pretty much the same really. Pro has more networking stuff and advanced settings, Media Center has more you know... Media stuff, and Home is fairly vanilla. The advantage to Media Center is that it does gove you a nice interface for manipulating all your media, more feature-rich than Front Row, and in a pretty decent layout. So, you are misinformed in that regard, there is no problem in running Media Center.

Just how large is your music library? Bear in mind that a full install of XP is going to take up a few gigs, and of course bear in mind the ever present gigabyte vs gibabyte argument, so 160 isn't 160. I only say this because you apparently are chock full of common sense, especially in regards to things like what billionaires do with their money or time, or at least what you think they are doing with their time.

You have to give more information for anyone to be more helpful beyond just giving you blanket recommendations like "Get a Latitude" "Get a MacBook" "Get an Asus F6J" "Get a Sager". So come back with music library size, and system reqs for whatever Serato is, and better advise will follow.

 

[l Thomas l]

http://www.marxist.com/science...l_gates_capitalism.htm
http://www.alternet.org/environment/52785/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...2/AR2006091201384.html (Rockefeller "Charity" it's right in everyone's faces too. Right when you hear Rockefeller you know something's up. )
..among the many other links

We already destroyed Africa with AIDS, poverty, etc. We have people in prison with inadequate trials. We have fellow humans living in our own country with substandard living conditions while people go to alternate houses that they own just for vacation.

^ off topic



My bad, I should have explained Serato a little more. I'm talking about Scratch Live. It's an interface (software is free online) that lets you use special vinyl to play songs from your computer. The computer needs to be good to keep all the latency low, so you maintain the vinyl feel.

Yes I am misinformed about XP Media Center. If it really is Home with some extras, maybe I'll just use XPLite and get rid of all the extras. I've never used home before. Is there anything important that you can only use with Pro? (i have pro)

 

[l Thomas l]

Yeah my music library isn't too big (30GB), but I need room to grow. Plus most of the songs are in low MP3 formats (the best I have is 192) which is not good for rocking clubs on good speakers. I'm gonna start using at least 320, if not lossless. (I just learned this myself. 320 is OK. I mean it's not bad since people mainly just wanna hear the songs, but I rather have most songs be good quality, and only the latest songs is a little lower quality)

 

[TheStu]

Originally posted by: l Thomas l
Yeah my music library isn't too big (30GB), but I need room to grow. Plus most of the songs are in low MP3 formats (the best I have is 192) which is not good for rocking clubs on good speakers. I'm gonna start using at least 320, if not lossless. (I just learned this myself. 320 is OK. I mean it's not bad since people mainly just wanna hear the songs, but I rather have most songs be good quality, and only the latest songs is a little lower quality)

30GB library, at 192kbps... so maybe 5000-6000 songs? Last I figured it, 128kbps is roughly 1MB/min, so 192 would be roughly 1.5MB/min, average song is about 4 minutes long, so call it 5000 songs. Lossless is almost exactly 8 times the size of 128kbps, putting it at around 1Mbps bitrate. So, now it is 8MB/min, and at around 20,000 minutes worth of songs, you are looking at 160,000MB, so now you are talking 160GB. Putting it at 320kbps will get you 50,000MB so the library will almost double in size once you re-rip the items at 320kbps.

Bear in mind that you cannot take a 192kbps song and convert it to 320kbps.... ok you can, but there is no point. The loss from the original conversion cannot be gotten back, something cannot be created out of nothing. All you will get is a higher bitrate 192kbps song, I know this seems strange, but it is like if you were to take a picture with your cell phone... print it out, and then get a 12MP DSLR and take a picture of that print. The picture you just took is now an incredibly high quality copy of a low quality image... get the analogy?

So, you will have to get all the songs that you have now in CD form, and then re-rip them into your media player at your preferred bitrate.

 

[zig3695]

mmm... trust me, if you are planning on using 320kbs for better quality sound, just go to all FLAC and be done with it. you cant beat original quality, i have everything in 256kbs but im now in the process of FLACin it all. and i dont think flac is that much larger then 320kbs mp3 anyway...

 

[l Thomas l]

Yeah I know you can't convert 128 to 320.

Originally posted by: zig3695
mmm... trust me, if you are planning on using 320kbs for better quality sound, just go to all FLAC and be done with it. you cant beat original quality, i have everything in 256kbs but im now in the process of FLACin it all. and i dont think flac is that much larger then 320kbs mp3 anyway...

If Serato supports FLAC I will. How much bigger is it?

 

[AsianriceX]

Just get a MacBook and be done with it.

If you're looking for a straight forward solution with minimal baggage, that would be the best way to go.

Go with a Firewire external drive since that operates on a completely separate bus than USB and you won't have Serato and the drive fighting over limited bandwidth.

If you're not familiar with rebuilding a system to keep it clean, I'd go against getting a PC and all the extra OEM bloatware that comes with it. Last thing you want are hiccups and dropouts during a live set.

As for FLAC vs. MP3, FLAC isn't supported in Serato.

I keep a relatively permanent FLAC'd library of music and transcode it into MP3 or WAV for my mp3 player library and a Serato library.

I've got a decent setup using my main workstation doing Serato, but eventually I'd like to move it all to a laptop.

 

[l Thomas l]

^ Yeah people have told me that.

What I was gonna do was just reformat the drive right when I got it.

I'll just use my USB drive to copy between computer and laptop for the time being. Maybe later I'll get a Firewire drive and actually use it live.

And yeah, I read the serato forums and quickly found FLAC isn't supported yet.

I think I'm gonna go with a laptop from Fry's, especially since processor prices are dropping now. How long should I wait?

 

[TheStu]

You know, I didn't say it before... but just get the MacBook and be done with it.

 

[l Thomas l]

I might, but now I'm leaning towards a pc because of what I've been reading on the Serato forums. Do you know how much the student discount is for a MacBook? I've heard it's a percentage, and I've also heard the total is $150.

 

[TheStu]

With the exception of the Mac Mini, the discount is based on the type of machine that it is. If it is a Pro machine, you get $200 off, if it is a consumer machine, you get $100 off. That is off the sticker price, you get additional discounts on the upgrades like RAM, Hard Drive, Software that sort of thing. Where the RAM might cost $75, it costs $67 under student discount.

What exactly have you been reading on the Serato forums?

 

[KlokWyze]

My friend uses Serato all the time & got a Macbook specifically for it. A couple of other people I know were saying Serato crashes occasionally on Windows machines. So I would say go with a Mac unless you want your shit crashin in the middle of a set.

What you spin?

 

[l Thomas l]

I've been reading that the different doesn't really matter although people generally seem to think Macs are easier with less problems.

I heard PCs have a lotta drop outs and other issues, but I've never had a problem with a PC before, at least not one that I couldn't fix.

Also what do you think about the whole library situation? Serato needs to add information to the files in my iTunes library. Will it be easy to transfer from desktop PC to a laptop (mac or pc)? I'm thinking either way it'll be a pain and I should just keep it all on the external hard drive and then just make backups on the seperate computers. But I don't want an external HD slowing down the USB.