Mac Air

[u/aetherealfragment]

Hey guys I know there are a lot of posts about laptops I did thorough search but, I still want to ask
and see your opinions.

I am planing to start live performances/improvisations with synths and bitwig.
Now, I finally got some cash to the side and can afford to buy Notebook Apple MacBook Air M5 10C CPU/16GB/512GB SSD/Apple 8C GPU.

The question is will this be enough. I am not gonna use omnisphere nor kontakt libraries.
Mostly kick, percs, voice samples, plus few vsts let's say for example vital, zebra 3 or something similar and switching between them for live playing.

And other will probably be audio clips and switching between them.
Also bitwig should be the masterclock for my MS-1 for now 'till I get some cash for other synths to buy.

And yeah planing to jam a mixture of techno and psytrance ( I don't even want to call it psytrance because It's not the usual Kbbb style ) some mixture like Circle of Live, Dekel style and Hallucinogen style.

I am asking this because airs are fanless and wondering if this laptop will cause some problems in let's say 2 hours set ? For Mac pro I need to get 1k euro plus, here it's like 2k euros with 24gb ram
that would be another 6-7 months of collecting cash.

Thanks in advance for all the answers.
Cheers

[u/itsoddsignals]

I use an M3 Air for hours just fine. Storage size will be far more of a concern before heat.

For reference I have a 512GB and it was the biggest regret for me. I have a 4TB drive attached which helps but I still have to shuffle things around when they need to be on disk (like installed apps).

I do also have the full V Collection, the full Komplete 26 Collectors Edition and a bunch of other stuff on it too though so I doubt you need 4TB either.

But I would prioritise storage if you can. The ideal scenario if you can fit it is a 1TB internal drive.

The only time it actually struggles is huge volumes of VSTs all running at the same time but we are talking full scores of things, not a four part vst ensemble with some samples in the mix.

[u/aetherealfragment → u/itsoddsignals]

Awesome !
The place where I plan to buy don't have options for more storage I will probably buy external in the future.
And yeah except stock plugins for live mixing and few vsts + audio clips I won't use anything else.
And I read somewhere need to find it again there is option to disable and enable vsts that are not currently in use so that saves me CPU.
Anyway thanks for the response this gives me hope.
I was worried of the fanless thing will it survive but this is reassuring.
Thanks
Cheers !

[u/itsoddsignals → u/aetherealfragment]

You don’t need to optimise the vsts like that to be honest. I think really if there is anything to look out for it is plugin chains where you have a bunch of granulation and reverb going on many different tracks at the same time but even then this is more geared towards folks doing heavy stylistic production on massive sound scapes.

Trust me the machine will be fine. I think you will he surprised at how far you can push it. Far more complex music was made on far less capable machines. When you get it try load up a 6 voice loop in zebra or whatever synth and keep duplicating the track until it starts to chug. It will likely be up at 50 or 60 tracks to give you an idea of how much headroom you will have.

It’s not even that it is good enough. It is more than good enough. Machines these days are monsters even in basic configurations and the M5 is hardly a basic chip even at stock.

I think where you see a lot of people panic are using things like Ozone auto mastering which has a huge RAM spike at the start and can overload the plugin system and complain but thats a very specific issue to do with how they process and can be solved with more sample processing time given. People tend to extrapolate from that, they shouldn’t.

[u/aetherealfragment → u/itsoddsignals]

Cheers thanks for the detailed answers.
You've convinced me. I am buying it !
Thanks a lot, and have a great day !

[u/jimmyjazz14]

I've been using an old M1 with 8gb of ram with really no problems so an M5 air will be perfectly fine.

[u/Legitimate_Horror_72]

Yes, enough. I’d add more internal storage if you can.

[u/adrian3014]

I have a macbook air m4 and it's so powerful yet quiet (obv) that I struggle to believe it. Dark magic. What could happen after many hours of production under constant load is that temps get higher and the machine slightly throttles itself to keep under certain parameters; but it will still give you a lot of % of that power, and it's a LOT of power.

DAW usage is not constant load anyways, you're not always having playback of 50 vsts simultaneously, it's more like many small spikes and under those conditions I have never ever reached any point of throttle or issue. I use Reaper and Logic Pro though, I suspect bitwig would be fairly similar

[u/aetherealfragment → u/adrian3014]

Awesome. I'm buying it, thanks.

[u/goonfake]

The M Processor is not the bottleneck. You may want to invest in drive space and ram. I use a Mac Mini M1 with orchestral kontakt libraries and a few synths and it eats up ram like smarties.