info need

Hi,
just an advice for a totally newby. I'm planning to buy a laptop. My options are a new wintel PIII 700, 128 ram with a fast u-dma 66 hard disk and sound blaster pro compatible in-built audio hardware or a good second hand powerbook g3. I need to use it with a realt time soft (microtonal) sampler and synth - as gigasampler. In the next future I'd like also to use also Csound. I think i will need also to expand it with a midi interface via USB or PCMCIA...
What it the best solution? and first of all, in your experience, could a soft sampler run in *real* real- time in a laptop?
thank you in advance!
silvio

My advice to all is that *any* recent PC -- desktop or laptop -- will work
for *non-real-time* e-music, provided you have enough hard disk space for
the piece you're working on. A WAV file is roughly 10 MBytes per minute (16
bits, 44.1K samples per second, 2 channels), so you will definitely want a
CD-R or CD-RW.

However, if you're interested in *real-time* performance, it is best to
think of your computer as a *control-rate* device and generate the actual
audio with some off-board DSP equipment. In other words, use a cheaper
computer and save some money for a better synthesizer than what comes in a
computer sound card. No matter how fast your main CPU is, I think you'll be
disappointed with the kinds of sound you can generate with algorithms that
run in real time, and you'll also find that the operating system, especially
Windows, uses a lot of resources.

As to PC/Windows vs. MAC/MacOS vs. Linux, that will depend on what software
you want to run. CSound is available for all three. There are quite a few
packages that are available only for the MAC/MacOS, which I think is a real
pity. I have a Toshiba Satellite 2595 CDT (400 MHz Celeron, 192 MB RAM, 6 GB
disk space and a Sony Spressa CD-RW) which is fine, as I noted above, for
off-line audio work -- a digital sound studio -- but I have augmented that
with a Yamaha VL70-m (monophonic) synthesizer which uses advanced physical
modelling techniques. I could have probably gone with a DSP chip evaluation
module and saved some money, but I also bought the Yamaha WX5 woodwind
controller to use as a MIDI source (I'm a flute player) and the combination
seemed very natural and saves me months of programming.

If I were starting from scratch, buying a new machine solely for e-music, I
would get an Intel desktop rather than a laptop, mostly because the hard
disks are bigger and cheaper and you have actual slots for actual audio
equipment rather than just serial, parallel and USB ports. And I would most
likely run Linux rather than Windows because it has a lot less overhead. But
I still wouldn't count on it as a real-time DSP engine.
--
M. Edward Borasky
mailto:znmeb@teleport.com
http://www.borasky-research.com

Cold leftover pizza: it's not just for breakfast any more!