And if you haven't guessed already, I'm talking about the new range of Windows-based laptops featuring Intel's Centrino technology, which has been causing quite a stir in the computing world. Forgetting the heat issue for a moment, a G3- or G4-powered iBook or Powerbook (with the exception of some of the most recent Aluminium Powerbook models) has a typical battery life of around three to four hours, compared to around two hours for a typical Mobile Pentium 4-based system.īut if I was to tell you about a laptop that had been built using technology specifically developed for mobile use, which could give you around eight hours of battery life while still providing a similar level of performance to desktop and other laptop computers, and without frying your legs, would you be interested? Of course you would. This fact has allowed Apple to produce Powerbooks that are powerful, but which still have reasonable battery lives and seductive form factors. In the past, Apple's Powerbooks have generally fared better than their Intel or AMD-based counterparts, thanks to the fact the G3 and G4 processors traditionally ran slightly cooler than Pentium III or 4 chips, and required less power. Suddenly, cool is not the word to describe those sexy metal enclosures - conductor would be far more appropriate. It's almost a cliché these days that the last place you'd want to put a laptop is on your lap, since the heat that can be generated from G4- and Mobile Pentium 4-based laptops is terrific for frying eggs, but can make your computing experience rather painful. The amount of processing power you require from your laptop is directly proportional to the amount of battery power that will be consumed, and the amount of heat that will be generated. The problem of using desktop-derived technology in a laptop can be summed up in two words: heat and power. Musicians need powerful computers to run the number of native-based effects and instruments they're accustomed to on the desktop but in order to develop laptops, companies usually draw upon the same technology designed for desktop computers, and scale it down so it can basically fit in a smaller package. And while the idea of the laptop studio is nothing new, laptop computers themselves have many inherent flaws that particularly affect musicians, mostly because they concern the crucial issue of performance.
It's perhaps a fundamental irony that as studios become ever more powerful, requiring the computing power of small corporate networks in order to keep up with user expectations, the demand to be able to produce the same music on a portable system has never been greater. But does the promise hold true when running the most demanding music and audio software? MIDI should be visible as a kind of spike on the left channel.With the promise of improved battery life and more compact designs with no compromise in performance, Intel's Centrino technology should be the answer to the mobile musician's prayers. When you don't have a scope you might try to record the MIDI to left and audio to the right channel of a DAT and look at the recorded waveforms afterwards. With a storage scope this is even easier to measure of course. 1 msec so the sound card output delay is about 2 msec less as the figure you are measuring. The note event takes 1 msec, the MIDI stack in the OS also aprox. Just have someone repeatedly pressing the key while you are looking at the scope. When you now set up a VST synth in Live such that you here it everyttime you press a key (percussive sound is best) you will see the delay between the MIDI note (on one trace) and the audio output (on the other trace). You should set the trigger level such that each time you press a key on your MIDI keyboard the scope triggers (you might need to switch of MIDI clock from your MIDI device so that it only emits key up/down events).
The triggering needs to be set to "normal" to the MIDI channel.
The other channel you connect to the audio output of your sound card. With one channel you probe the MIDI input of Live (you have to ground one of the MIDI wiress to see something, MIDI is floating otherwise). You need a normal dual channel oscilloscope for this.