I have a celeron 1.13Ghz system and with the proper tweaks and sound card you can do a fair amount of mixing...recording is going to be different as that takes more than simply mixing. Low latency is harder to deal with..

I use my laptop as a mixdown machine with Wavelab and I record it in real time as well from my main machine. Never had any problems recording two tracks at a time. Sometimes when I go on the road I'll do some mixing on it and it holds up ok as long as the ASIO driver is solid and the buffer settings are at the max! Even if your pulling the data off of an external drive system, it's still going to tax it as it's a laptop...nothing more you can really do.

Lots of people use laptops but don't rely on them for your main system....

If you can do it, I'd go the non celeron route..more robust for more tracks and so forth.

Opus

Opus2000 wrote: I have a celeron 1.13Ghz system and with the proper tweaks and sound card you can do a fair amount of mixing...recording is going to be different as that takes more than simply mixing. Low latency is harder to deal with..

I use my laptop as a mixdown machine with Wavelab and I record it in real time as well from my main machine. Never had any problems recording two tracks at a time. Sometimes when I go on the road I'll do some mixing on it and it holds up ok as long as the ASIO driver is solid and the buffer settings are at the max! Even if your pulling the data off of an external drive system, it's still going to tax it as it's a laptop...nothing more you can really do.

Lots of people use laptops but don't rely on them for your main system....

If you can do it, I'd go the non celeron route..more robust for more tracks and so forth.

Opus

Thank you for your response.

I was under the impression of mixing being more taxing on a system than actual recording to the drive. Of course, I would need to do some "mixing" for monitoring, though I will not do any processing.

A large latency buffer is really not a big deal as many interfaces support direct monitoring, but I guess a bigger buffer requires more memory.

A Pentium M/Centrino-system should be able to handle tracking, not sure about Celeron.

And as preciously stated, this is not my main system. This system will be used for on-location multi-track recording only where-as I will mix on my wastly superior desktop system.

I feel this is were I have to start if I am to supply a service around here, tracking bands at their rehearsal-places, and without a drivers license or a car I am sort of stuck being on foot.
I like walking though ;).

It should be able to..:

- record/playback 16/24+ tracks of 16-24bit/44-96KHz
- basic editing (arranging, clip-editing)

With a Celeron notebook, No Way! The notebook versions of this processor are the worst I have ever benchmarked. Centrino/M are optimized for mobile communications not recording I would avoid them also. If you must use a notebook get a P4 for the requirements you list. An even better solution for far less money is the Shuttle XPC. Randy (aka Randyman) has been using one for his mobile recording for a while now and reports great results. These things are tiny and with a small LCD monitor are very portable. Randy gives the low down on his in this thread.

(Dead Link Removed)

Good luck

Big_D wrote:

It should be able to..:

- record/playback 16/24+ tracks of 16-24bit/44-96KHz
- basic editing (arranging, clip-editing)

With a Celeron notebook, No Way! The notebook versions of this processor are the worst I have ever benchmarked. Centrino/M are optimized for mobile communications not recording I would avoid them also. If you must use a notebook get a P4 for the requirements you list. An even better solution for far less money is the Shuttle XPC. Randy (aka Randyman) has been using one for his mobile recording for a while now and reports great results. These things are tiny and with a small LCD monitor are very portable. Randy gives the low down on his in this thread.

(Dead Link Removed)

Good luck

I still think a Centrino could handle this as I used to own one actually. But it was no desktop killer, that's for sure. For tracking it should be ok. I sold it because of the cheap Ricoh CardBus and firewire controllers it had.

The shuttle route is also an option, and I could get some use out of my Xenarc 7" TFT screen that I bought earlier.. I was planing building a short-depth 1U rack for this purpose.

It is not as mobile as I could wish for through.

i have a 1.5Ghz centrino w/ 512 mb ram. i use this w/ cubase and the grand and sampletank, as the vst plugin, and it works awesome (24bit, 48khz). very small latency.
oh, and i use m-audio fw 410.