The Right Computer for Music Production

I was using Macs for a long time. But after recent developments I'm kind of frustrated about Apple and their pricing policy so I decided to build a Hackintosh last christmas and I didn't regret it ;)
 
For serious music production work I recommend Apple Mac dual CPU desktops. Technically it is possible to use desktops and laptops running on PC based systems for music production and can work in a less serious setting for instance to learn to craft the mix, especially if you also optimize that environment for that specific use.

You see, advanced DAW software combined with the software plugins and the software for the audio interface is an advanced software setup and when you run that on a Windows system, much of that software is written using advanced unmanaged code which puts the memory management burden on the software developers. In practice when you have layer upon layer of that as advanced code being written by developers against the clock and have various complex hardware + software setups never having been properly tested, memory issues and other types of issues tend to leak into it, so the software tends to end up having complex memory issues that can cause a lot of various types of issues.

Besides this, the Windows systems are not primarily designed for multimedia production workloads, they are more designed to handle scenarios where the system resources are consumed by mixed workloads, where security, performance and reliability on the system as a whole are some key quality aspects. So what ends up happening is that the system can become quite unpredictable as it constantly performs various unrelated processing in the background. In serious settings you want predictability and repeatability, especially when it comes to things having an impact on the audio quality.

Laptops in general are also often configured to be power efficient/aware, so that can also cause various side effects.

Overall, go for a dual CPU solution, desktop, Apple Mac, use as little software as possible and for the effect software you use, use software that is shipped with hardware/accelerator cards/processing units designed to distribute the load off of the DAW. Also ensure there is very fast communication between the audio interface and the computer, native audio interface hardware cards is a good default route.

Be aware of the amount of noise a digital solution can end up having and how much that can eat on the perception of the music, I'm amazed at how much noise the software producers are allowing into their plug-ins and the fact that they often leave the noise turned on by default makes you wonder...

Also be aware that when it comes music + software, newer is not necessarily cleaner/more friendly to the audio. For instance when it comes to latency, older versions are overall more likely to produce better latency figures. Overall it's ideal to be epic about this, music is too "holy" to sacrifice... Music + Digital = Not such a great match.
 
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