Logic Pro 9 MacBook Air & Logic Pro

yavuz

yavuz

Logician
I have been researching about a new MAC but I cannot makeup my mind.

The only thing that really worries me is the external Hard Drives.
I have a western Digital Studio Pro which has USB2.0 and FW800 connections.
I am using it with FW800 now.
I am worried about a performance drop when I use it with MB Air.

The things I do with my current MB Pro 2.4 GHZ ( 2009 - May ) , 4GB RAM.
  1. Record my jazz band live to 16 tracks with RME-FFUC + Presonus Digimax
  2. Write jingles for TV ( usually 10-12 tracks with 5-6 EXS instrmnts and 2-3 NI KOMPLETE Elements )
  3. Compose, ( 2-3 Amp designer tracks, 2-3 NI Kontakt, 2-3 EXS instrts )
  4. Compose with reason rewired to Logic

I now have all of my samples in my internal drive, but since NI Komplete has 90GB of library, I might have to move those external drive and this might result in a performance hit with a USB drive.

I know internal drive is very fast and should be fine with audio recording but, reading sample from an external USB2.0 drive worries me.

How is your experience with the new MacBook Air?
What do you guys think?
Will it be fine for my needs?
 
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i know few people tha use HD drives with logic and they never complained about speed... that said i never tried myself so i cannot help much but i'd rather have a 13 inches macbook pro than a MBA....Faster CPU for little less portability ;)
 
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The fastest (2.16 GHz) 13" MBA's CPU isn't that much slower than a 2009 2.4 GHz MBP and the SSD may not be the fastest on the market but still beats the * out of any conventional HDD. So in many situations the new 13" MBA is considerably faster than a stock 2009 2.4 Ghz MBP. (You could always upgrade the MBP with an SSD though.)

The fastest (1.6 GHz) 11" MBA's CPU scores about 30% lower than a 2009 2.4 Ghz in most benchmarks though. That's a considerable difference if you use a lot of CPU heavy plug-ins.

There's no FW in the MBA and USB is quite a bit slower. And it's a LOT slower than an internal drive. If you just use the drive to load stuff in to memory, that'll only affect loading times. But streaming from disk might turn out to be a problem.

If you do get an MBA, max it out. You can't upgrade neither RAM nor the SSD later. 4 GB RAM is a must.

I recently swapped my late 2008 unibody 2.4 GHz MBP for an 11" 1.6 Ghz MBA and yes, it's a compromise, the screen's a bit small and I have to freeze tracks more often to conserve CPU. But its portability rocks! I'm not looking back... :cool:
 
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yavuz said:
Thanks for sharing you real life experience.
I will make-up my mind very soon.
Thanks...
Click to expand...

Yes, well, I forgot to mention that I do use an NI instrument, the Kompakt drum kit Abbey Road 60's drums (the biggest version) with my MBA. I use it with the memory server option, spending some 384 MB of RAM preloading it. That works perfectly fine. Well, as fine as any NI Kompakt library does - which is to say: a bit flakey. But certainly as fine as with my old MBP. Or actually even better, since it preloads to RAM much faster with my MBA (I keep the library on the MBA's SSD).
 
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