Love it or hate it but Apple/OS X are really the only ones who seem to give a shit about low latency audio and professional audio in general (built into the OS).īetween core audio low latency, aggregate devices, and being able to route interfaces Audio and MIDI to each other in a modular sort of fashion right in the OS just make me not want to deal with setting up and hacking around to get things to work well on a windows machine when I don't have to do anything to make it work on OS X. from music creation apps such as Ableton, Serato, and Avid Pro Tools, to workstation applications like. Once I got a Mac for music I just sort of phased out all my Windows machines and now I have nothing but Macs. Sorry it's been a while since I've setup a Windows machine for music. Discussion of music production, audio, equipment and any related topics, either with or without Ableton Live.
This gives priority to things like audio interface drivers, seems counter intuitive but I'm pretty sure that's how it supposed to be setup for audio.
So if you were trying to push things a low latency the Mac would handle it better than the PC laptop (if you are using 3rd party interface/drivers this shouldn't matter as much).Īlso I think on a windows machine you want to set the Processor priority to "background services" rather than "programs".
When I have a good starting point for a song I flesh it out with the old keyboard/mouse routine but the touchscreen is awesome for basic mix/transport control when jamming.Were you using an audio interface with drivers or were you just using built in laptop audio? Apple Core audio (Audio for all Macs) have low latency audio drivers built into the system where windows does not. MACs are Expensive PCs are More Affordable PCs May Be More Likely to Crash MACs Tend to be. or, at least, there is a more direct relationship between seeing something I want to press on the screen and just reaching out and touching as apposed to reaching over from my jam station to grab the mouse and drag the cursor to said point and “clicking”. MACs Are Better at Using Ableton Live For Live Performance. what I was surprised to find is that I get that same tactile feeling using a touchscreen. I am a big proponent of hardware - I love the tactile feel of knobs. Even using Ableton’s UI I can get basic controls via touchscreen as well. It’s great to have my monitor on a vesa mount and be able to use the touchable pro app to trigger clips and mix and adjust send levels on the fly when jamming. Another surprising benefit (for me) is windows touch screen support. but It happens maybe 10% of the time I am pretty good a saving consistently so it hasn’t been a big issue. I definitely get more of the odd ‘not responding’ errors and glitches on PC vs Mac but it only really happens if I let me computer sleep mid project. Overall, I agree that once you are in your respective program there isn’t much difference in use.
I was able to build a beast of a PC with 32 gigs of ram for half of what a comparative Mac mini would have cost. I’m sticking with PC due to economics, easy upgradability and touchscreen support.Īfter being a Mac user for most of my life I too started to think about moving to PC from an economics standpoint. TL DR: for me Mac has the slight edge in stability so that may be a consideration if your running Ableton during a live set.