New Windows Laptop - PG Music Forums

I’m going to buy a new Laptop with Windows Operating system.
Apart from disk capacity, what other specs do I need to pay attention to in order for the laptop to run BIAB fastest?
Also, what are your recommendations for those specs?
Thank you.

1. Most RAM available for the model that you are considering.
2. Fastest SSD Drive offered.
3. Top-rated sound card. Stock laptops are known to have marginal sound cards.
YMMV
Good luck.
Just my humble opinion.

Fastest...
Make sure motherboard supports SSD drives speeds of Samsung 970 EVO NVMe or equivalent.
Ram...honestly not too big of a deal (for BIAB) I did not notice ANY difference between 16GB and 32GB Ram installed speed-wise.

Donny mentioned soundcard (If he means a built in ones...)I will disagree. Most laptops, even higher tier will have your Realtek chips... Which pulls BIAB just fine with Asio4All drivers.
It is MUCH easier to get a good quality, basic 24bit external card under $100 that you might have already...than to look for laptop that has something specific "built in".

My personal advice, get a laptop with at least one USB-C v2 (AKA Thunderbolt 3) port. Preferably 2 of these. If you ever decide to go external/audiophile for BIAB and need ports to be "fast", that would be your fastest. And those wonderful ports support video signal too. So when I do my BIAB choirs, I have a second monitor connected to laptop (to Thunderbolt port) with my VST's on the secod monitor so I can adjust and see stuff without constantly opening and closing windows.

I have a Roland Duo-Capture EX connected with USB to my current laptop and my guitar and mic inputs to my computer go through that. What I’m looking for is the right computer specs so that when I use a command on my computer to preview a style or to create a song or change key or anything like that the computer does it instantly rather than taking 10 seconds every time I hit the enter key. It’s so frustratingly load a style, listen to the result, try another one, etc. etc. etc. I spend way to much time sitting there waiting. Can you tell me what I need in order to speed all this up to instantaneous? For example is it Ram, GHz, Disk technology, Intel I-5, I-7 or something else or several something’s? Thank you so much for your help.

You will wait...
Regardless of system. I tried hard finding a way to make it faster..
Regeneration process, that is what's taking time. I think it is a little bit faster if you "preview" in stylepicker rather than opening style in main window...

In my opinion, mostly, it has to do with individual tracks being loaded from original source instead of loading them into memory (which should not be a resource issue for most modern computers)

So, each time you change a chord or such in main page, BIAB will go to the source file folders on your hard drive to OPEN->generate instead of just generating.

Some weeks ago, P.Gannon talked about speeding things up (generation)
I hope it included BIAB in that plan, not just plugin...

I recently purchased an ACER i7 2 in 1 laptop device with SSD and 8 gig RAM no moving parts. It is way over the top for my uses (I play my songs when performing, and use a guitar sim to play guitar through and not much else) but why not for the extra $100 or so. It takes only a few seconds to load and login however some applications (eg guitar sims) do take considerable time to load. That is normal behaviour. Most likely an i5 or even an i3 would be not much slower.

I have an i7 HP desktop with SSD and 16 gig of RAM which is also over the top but that is what I use to generate my songs using BIAB. Generation will take time. I imagine there is a fair bit going on in terms of computing when generating a song. Playback in BIAB is quicker assuming no regeneration but it still takes time that is the nature of computing.

My thoughts
Tony

I think RustySpoon and Teunis nailed it above.

I too went down the rabbit hole of trying to speed up regeneration of BIAB. I run a NMVE SSD hard drive with only programs on it, an over clocked i7 processor running at 4.6 GHz with no stepping or power savings ( I have since dropped back to stock 4.2GHZ ), all RT's and RD's on a separate internal 7200 rpm drive and all tunes on another internal 7200 drive and 32 GB of DDR4 RAM.

You would think that a system like this would burn through BIAB regenerations in a heartbeat, but that's not the case. Does Win10 startup faster...absolutely. Do programs load faster..absolutely. Regenerations might be a tad faster than my modified i5 system but certainly not enough to justify what I put into this new system.

In fact, I find that the initial startup of BIAB 2019 loads much slower than BIAB 2018 even with FAST STARTUP enabled.

So, live and learn. I guess I future proofed myself for a long time and for photo and video editing, this thing is great. But as far as faster regenerations, the program itself seems to be the bottleneck as it just didn't happen for me.

Jeff

Thanks, for this and other threads. Very informative.

My current notebook can't take a bigger drive, so I'm stuck plugging a USB drive in to run Realtracks. It's a USB 3 port, so it's fast, but it's a real drag plugging it all in every time I use it, along with a mouse, audio interface and various other stuff. I might as well carry a desktop around with me.

I'm thinking about a new notebook and looked at various top end choices but they're so expensive. Being in HK, I think I'll just grab something reasonably priced in the computer markets. I'm thinking a 1TB SSD drive, a built in mechanical Hard Drive, 16 Gb or Ram and several USB ports on it. Also it has to be very quiet as I want to record on it. This is the stickiest problem.

I'm running BIAB 2019, Reaper, Izotope etc. Also Samples.

Most laptops do not have room inside for both an SSD boot drive and an additional hard drive. You want the SSD, for speed, lack of noise, and battery life. Therefore I think you do not want a hard drive.

If you get a big enough SSD, just put BIAB on that (unless you have the audiophile version of BIAB).

EDIT I see there are earlier posts in this thread; I just read and responded to that last one. The most important factor in a computer for speed in generating a BIAB song is, some of us think, the CPU. Get the fastest you can. Second would be the speed of the storage device, and the SSD will cover that nicely. Further down the priority is size and speed of RAM, and at the bottom is graphics.