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  • Is There A Mac Laptop that Will Run Vienna Ensemble Well?

    Never had a laptop before but was wondering if some kind of Macbook would handle VE well, while my Mac Pro ran Logic or Nuendo... Thanks Tom

  • Depends what you want to achieve with VE. I have a Macbook 2ghz 2GB ram. (10.4.11 - Logic Pro 8) it will run VE well (now....i had to do a system re-install to get rid of audio issues - others have had no trouble) but you are limited by Ram. 2GB and probs about 16ish instances with the CPU maxing. And you'd have to run a seperate Ext HD for the samples.... i have this setup at home and a Powermac in the studio. Combine the two on bigger projects.

    hope this helps 


  • The most recent MacBook Pro Laptops can be equipped with 4GB of RAM - - available inexpensively at Other World Computing. (Do not purchase RAM from Apple at their exorbitant prices - - but save the RAM that came with the computer. If something goes wrong with any Mac, Apple always blames 3rd party RAM and removes it, so before sending a computer in for repairs one has to remove the 3rd party RAM and reinstall the original RAM - - no big deal.) The newest MacBook Pros come with 3 different processor choices (all are Core 2 Duo): 2.2 GHz, 2.4 GHz and 2.6GHz - - every increase in speed correlating with an increase in price. The following is quoted from an article that appeared on Macnn. You can read the whole article at

    http://www.primatelabs.ca/blog/2007/11/macbook-pro-performance-november-2007/

    "On the latest MacBook Pros, processor benchmark scores (Integer Performance and Floating Point Performance) scale with processor speed; a 20% increase in speed will bring about a 20% increase in score.

    Memory benchmark scores (Memory Performance and Stream Performance) are a different story. Since all of the MacBooks have the same chipset and use the same memory (which influence memory benchmark scores far more than the processor), there isn’t as much of a gain.

    So, is configuring a MacBook Pro with a 2.6GHz processor instead of a 2.4GHz processor worth it? If you’re running a lot of processor-intensive tasks where even a small increase in performance is noticeable (and appreciated) then you might want to consider it. Otherwise I’d recommend adding more RAM instead. More RAM will probably help your MacBook Pro performance more than just a faster processor"


  • Thanks for the info! OK, let me ask this. Would 4G memory allow me to run something like: 1 VLNS Legato 2 VLAS Legato 3 VCs Legato 4 CBs Legato And the same for the basic instruments in brass and woodwinds all in one go, so I could leave an orchestral setup up all the time? I have trouble figuring out the memory vs the patches... Thanks Tom

  •  Tom:

    On a a dual 2.5GHz G5 equipped with 7 GB of RAM running OS 10.5.1:

    with 13 level 1 matrices + 4 performance legato instruments loaded as VI instances (not VE) in Logic 8 + 1 instance of Altiverb, Activity Monitor reports that there are 3.8 GB of remaining free RAM

    (running a similar test under OS 10.4.11 Activity Monitor reports considerably less (about 1.8 - 2.2GB) free RAM)

    Activity Monitor reports that VSL-Server is using 2.08 GB of RAM  and that Logic 8 is using 328.44 MB of RAM

    Activity Monitor reports a total of 3.17GB  of RAM in use.

    Thus it appears that one could successfully run a similar configuration on a Macbook Pro equipped with 4GB of RAM. 


  • Working great with Cubase 4.1

    I have 17 MB pro wiht 4 gig ram . Pci32 800 fire wire haed drive.