Hi all, I know many similar questions have been asked so please forgive me if its an ignorant question.
Does anyone know if an older laptop with an i5-6300u will be capable enough for ardour? I don’t currently own a PC and have no experience with ardour, so I want to make sure what I’m buying is going to be powerful enough.
Thanks in anticipation
I have a 4 × Intel® Core™ i5-4310M CPU @ 2.70GHz laptop that I use for prototyping - not for production work. Shipped from manufacturer (Dell) in February 2015. 8 GB RAM. It is running a fully updated KDE Neon distribution (based on Ubuntu). I can install and run Ardour 8.10.0 without any problems. I can’t comment on how robust it is, though, as I have not used it for any complex projects. I have installed and tried the latest LSP plugins also, the one or two that I tried seem to work normally. Simple MIDI works in the one track I have tried it in. Again, can’t comment on whether or not it will be powerful enough to do everything you might want to do, so continue to look for confirmation here.
Thanks Tony, according to userbenchmark that processor is marginally better than the one i referenced but seems to be in a similar ballpark: UserBenchmark: Intel Core i5-4310U vs i5-6300U
hopefully some other users can provide further info
I have a Thinkpad X230 with an Intel Core i7-3520M.
Ardour runs fine on it, no issues.
What type of work do you expect to do? Recording audio can need less processing capability than running multiple software synthesizers for example.
Thanks Gunther
Hard to say with certainty as its all new to me, I’m not a professional and I have no meaningful experience with DAWs and the like, so I’ll be discovering everything for the first time.
The bread and butter will be a typical rock ensemble. I intend on recording guitars straight from the preamp out jack on the amp. The bass likewise or from direct out connection. Unlikely to mic amps as they need to be cranked to get the optimal sound. Drums, synths, strings, keys and any other embellishments would need to be handled with midi.
I don’t know if what I’ve said is clear or practicable, I really don’t have experience or knowledge with it
One thing you might try is looking for in-person courses on music production in your area. I took two such courses, both of which offered hands-on experience with Pro Tools DAW from Avid. (In case you’re not familiar, Pro Tools is a paid, subscription model DAW that is used in many if not most professional content production studios.) I found these experiences to be translate-able to Ardour/open source with a reasonable amount of effort, research, and practice.
The first course I found was a five- or six-session program at a local music store (Yamaha dealer) that offered a variety of lessons in instruments, forming bands, and music production. At that point I had zero experience, just an interest in how it was all done. This got me started. The next year I enrolled in a summer course at the local university that was much more in-depth. Under the supervision of the instructor - a faculty member and professional musician - the students formed a band and recorded tracks for a cover of BB King’s “The Thrill Is Gone”. Each student was required to produce a final mix. My version is linked below; after I finished the mix I had it mastered by Chris Graham Mastering.
The bottom line is that it all turned out satisfactorily for me and I am now producing music in my home studio as a hobby.
Do keep in mind that the musicianship is the most important thing. It’s easy to get lost in the various complexities of a DAW program, but if you “Get It Right At The Source” (as one very popular YouTube influencer likes to say) the DAW part will be easy.
I write and track / record with an old laptop - an ASUS thing that has an i5-4200 (I think). A few years ago I swapped out the HDD for an SSD and doubled the RAM from 4GB to 8GB. The OS is LMDE6.
It’s powerful enough for what I do which ranges from writing / sequencing using samples and VSTs in Renoise, to programming (and finger drumming) percussion parts as MIDI using a VST like Ugritone, to recording multitrack guitars using amp sim VSTs like Guitarix and recording acoustic sound sources.
My plan is to start mixing on a separate Linux desktop PC running Mixbus 10 but until now I’ve been mixing on the same old laptop and it’s been absolutely fine. It all basically comes down to plugin use really - I tend to use lightweight plugins (GUI-less and/or using generic controls really helps) and sampling over extensive software synthesis etc.
Reaper appears to be somewhat ‘faster’ or ‘snappier’ on the laptop but Ardour handles things absolutely fine. I’ve done whole projects using Ardour without crashes or slowdowns etc.