The era of digital mixers, virtual synthesizers and guitar processors has made laptops indispensable for rehearsals and concerts, in professional and home studios, when you need multi-channel recording in the field. In this material, we are looking for the<!--td {border: 1px solid #ccc;}br {mso-data-placement:same-cell;}-->best laptop for music production and working with sound.

What to look out for

The processor is the heart of a laptop. You can add RAM, change the hard drive, add ports and connect an external screen. But if the processor in a laptop becomes obsolete, then most often the entire platform retires with it. And if we take into account that programs for working with sound consume gigahertz with the appetite of a black hole, then it becomes clear that it is the processor that should be looked at in the first place.

The number of cores and their frequency are of great importance. For comfortable work with music applications, you need at least four cores with a frequency as high as possible. A large number of streams will also be in the cashier, since most applications have already learned how to work with them correctly.

RAM - there is never a lot of it, because for plug-ins and sample libraries, RAM is their second dish after gigahertz (and sometimes the first). At least 8 GB is required, and 16 GB is better. The type of memory also matters (almost everywhere now DDR4) and its frequency - the larger it is, the faster the samples will be loaded.

A hard drive is ideally an SSD, because it will have to work with a lot of small files. You also need a large amount of space, because the music software eats permanent memory for dessert.

Here you might already think that to work with music, you definitely need a six-core monster for gamers for obscene money. Of course, as a universal workstation, this would be very good. But, firstly, the video card is practically unimportant when creating music, unless you plan to connect the device to a dozen monitors. Secondly, musical tasks are different, and many of them do not require everything and more at once, but only a couple of quite specific characteristics. Thus, it is possible to compile a list of laptops suitable for these tasks.