The Best Laptop For Music Production should be powerful and lightweight, while also having good battery capacity, for those situations where it is not connected to the mains.
Regardless of which platform you choose, there are a few considerations that remain consistent. When it comes to choosing the best laptop for your home studio, you'll want to pay close attention to the power and memory specs of the machine you're looking at. While the basic requirement for most DAWs is a multi-core processor, around 4GB of RAM, and a few gigabytes of storage, this won't be enough for real-world applications. Buying a laptop with music based on the "recommended minimum" specs is a recipe for future heartache and the need for an early upgrade. Instead, you need a laptop with enough power to handle the latest software and expanding file sizes, with enough power in the tank to cope with what you may need in the future.
For any traveling DJ or musician reading this guide, weight and portability are likely other important factors. Some of the sturdiest and highest spec laptops are also quite heavy, and your shoulders will quickly tire of lugging around those giants.
When choosing the best laptops for music production, we focused on computers with fast processors and enough RAM and storage to handle audio work as quickly and efficiently as possible. The best digital audio workstations (DAWs) and music production software can be resource-intensive, so update the base model accordingly. We also considered the breadth and depth of potential users who might want to buy a computer to make songs.
When shopping for the best laptops for music production, you must first consider the level and frequency of the use you want for a laptop. Are you going to play with melody sketches for fun once in a while, or do you imagine putting in some serious hours and sharing your work widely? There's a great chance that you end up digging deeper than you thought, so it's not a bad idea to think about buying a laptop for music production that you can grow into for several years. That means maximizing the specs, if possible.
The central processing unit (or CPU for short) is the brain of any laptop, executing or delegating all of the most important tasks. Computer processing speed is key for music producers. You'll want a fast renderer to capture multiple sources, sculpt responses, render effects in real-time, and minimize lag time. If your computer is too slow to process information, you can risk a musical idea slipping out of your head while you wait.
Random-access memory (or RAM for short) holds the information a computer needs, such as data in an application, in a short-term space to make it quickly accessible. When looking for a laptop for music production, having plenty of RAM is important to power your software program, especially if you are working with multitrack recordings.
Storage here refers to the amount of permanent space your computer has for system software and programs (as well as the temporary swap space available to get data in and out of memory). When you're about to run out of storage on a laptop, not only are you unable to save your shots, edits, etc., but performance issues ranging from processing lags to frequent crashes can quickly arise.