I've looked around a lot on here and found a great deal of info on the MacBook Pro, but not much on the MacBook. I was curious if anyone thought this was a reasonable machine to run Sibelius, Kontact, and VDL2 on. I saw that it doesn't offer a hard drive with 7200 rpm, but thought that if you max out on the RAM the hard drive wouldn't prove a problem. Or if necessary, I could run a faster external hard drive. Being a college student, something powerful, cheap, and portable would be nice. Any thoughts would be great. Peace...

Oh, by the way... would you be able to use the samples on an external HD and hook it up to another computer and use it (legally).

There's always those silly things that run Windows...  they're fast and relatively cheap...

If you install to an external hard drive, you may have registration problems if you change machines.  Check out NI on that one, ChopOut.

[quote author=TuoPohc link=topic=1136.msg4796#msg4796 date=1148363524]
I've looked around a lot on here and found a great deal of info on the MacBook Pro, but not much on the MacBook. I was curious if anyone thought this was a reasonable machine to run Sibelius, Kontact, and VDL2 on. I saw that it doesn't offer a hard drive with 7200 rpm, but thought that if you max out on the RAM the hard drive wouldn't prove a problem. Or if necessary, I could run a faster external hard drive. Being a college student, something powerful, cheap, and portable would be nice. Any thoughts would be great. Peace...

Oh, by the way... would you be able to use the samples on an external HD and hook it up to another computer and use it (legally).
[/quote]

I'm typing on my new Macbook right now.�� Love this machine!!�� I'm getting 2 gigs of ram on Thursday so I should know more about how it runs, cause with only 512 in it, its a dog!

BUT, VDL AND Finale & Sibelious are not ported universal yet, meaning they would run in Rosetta.....which means POOR performance.�� I spoke to the guys at Finale yesterday and they said '07 - in Julyish) will be compatible.�� I can only assume everyone else will do this too .........(sooner than later guys!!!!--- please!!)

";Now I play the waiting game.";

From what I can tell, the new MacBooks are setting themselves up to be pretty great for music making. A little 13"; screen would drive me nuts (personally), but if you can deal with that, and plan to max out the RAM with 2GB, this might be a good way to go. The main caveat at this point though is that many software programs (including Sibelius and VDL2) have not yet been released in Universal Binary format (for the new intel macs). That day is definitely coming, but in the midst of mid-2006, you may have to settle for the fact that these machines won't perform to their full potential with non-universal apps. I've heard reports of decent success running these apps anyway on intel macs, so that will only get better once the universal version start to arrive.

I noticed the black macbook was $200 more than the white one. I wonder why. If you can save a little extra, the 15"; MacBook Pro will give you more screen real estate and perhaps a bit better flexibility.

You could install the VDL2 program and library on an external hard drive (which isn't a bad idea for improved performance), however to be able to register it, the System ID of the actual machine you're using it on is required. So, no - you wouldn't be able to take an external HD around to numerous other machines and still be able to run the software. It's system specific - not drive specific.

Thank you all for the detailed replies. I was curious about updating to universal as well. For VDL and Sibelius is it going to be a crossgrade for like $30 or a complete upgrade for $200 or $400 a piece? And does anyone know of projected dates of release? Thanks again for all the info. Peace...

I think you'll find that Universal upgrades may vary from company to company. Seems like some companies are waiting till their next major release (i.e. Finale 2005, Sibelius 4) to officially be 'universal'. Major upgrades of that nature do typically come with an upgrade fee attached, which will depend on the developer.

Other companies on the other hand, have seemed to roll out their universal updates as more of a ";maintenance"; release for free. So it really tends to vary.

I think you'll be hard pressed to get an official date out of anyone just yet. Software development is an imperfect process and announcing official release dates can sometimes lead to 'vaporware' status.

As far as the hard drive speed goes, Most people running Powerbook G4's only have 5400 RPMs and personally, mine is doing just fine. I also have 1.25 gigs of ram, which has helped performance out tremendously.

The only Problem I ran into which could be drive related is when I'm  trying to use recording software to record the output of VDL2 and Sibelius. Since the instruments are using most of my RAM, there is a heavy tax on my hard drive to make the recording. Sometimes there are skips and other anomalies.

Now-a-days I do all my recording Via Logic Express 6 because I can have an almost unlimited number of things going on at once and the recording comes out perfect because it doesn�۪t do it in real-time, it simply takes as long as the CPU will allow which is often faster than real time and in some extreme cases, slower.

Does the windows versions of these programs work (Sib, VDL:2, Sonar) when booting up XP on the intel macs?  Does Universal Binary need to happen to work on both operating systems?  Just curious as I am about to totally convert my work station to Mac.

[quote author=Cobybos link=topic=1136.msg4865#msg4865 date=1148953165]
Does the windows versions of these programs work (Sib, VDL:2, Sonar) when booting up XP on the intel macs?�� Does Universal Binary need to happen to work on both operating systems?�� Just curious as I am about to totally convert my work station to Mac.
[/quote]

as long as you have the windows versions, yes they shuold work perfectly since your actually running windows - not an emulator.

Makes sense to me...

I don't know if this needs to be a new thread or not, but while we're on the topic of universal... if you run VDL samples through Kontakt 2 (universal), instead of the given player, will you still need to update VDL to Universal?

[quote author=TuoPohc link=topic=1136.msg4891#msg4891 date=1149320889]
I don't know if this needs to be a new thread or not, but while we're on the topic of universal... if you run VDL samples through Kontakt 2 (universal), instead of the given player, will you still need to update VDL to Universal?
[/quote]

That's a good question TuoPohc. The answer is no...you wouldn't need to wait for the universal VDL2 to take advantage of the speed boosts from running K2 natively with it's universal version (when it becomes available). According to NI, their target to have a universal version of K2 should be within a month (they originally stated '2nd quarter 2006'), so my guess is that it may not be too far off.