I’m not getting enough time to finish my audio project at home but I spend 2 hours a day on the train so I’m contemplating buying a laptop, the smaller the better.
Is anybody running Audacity on an ultraportable and if so how well is it working?
Basically I’m trying to work out what the smallest (preferably cheap) laptop I can get to comfortably run Audacity.
I am aware by the way that it’s not straightforward to work on the project on two different machines, I’ll work that bit out later.
Not got direct experience, but we have had at least one user on the forum successfully running Audacity on an EeePC (sorry, I don’t think they said which model).
How much horsepower you need depends on the project - the more tracks you have the more oomph you need.
I have a Pentium III 500MHz desktop machine that will run Audacity fine (up to about 10 simultaneous tracks)
Probably the most demanding part is the recording, which I guess you will not be doing on the train?
Playback and editing is less demanding.
The other consideration is that Audacity projects can get very large. Using the default 32bit format, each stereo track will use around 20MB per minute. Each time you process a file, the amount of data is increased due to the “Undo” files, so a 10 minute multi-track recording can quickly become a Gigabyte or more of data.
Thanks. Hopefully I’ve done most of the recording already, so yes I will only be editing on the train.
My project is eventually going to be an audio play with several characters and background noise etc, so I tend to have lots of tracks on the go. The whole thing is currently over 3Gb currently.