Making Music With a Core 2 Duo?

I'm thinking of grabbing a Thinkpad x200 or an x60, slapping 8 gigs of RAM into it, putting in an SSD, and librebooting it to have a free and durable portable computer. I wouldn't be using any CPU eating plugins (not that Linux has many of those), I would instead stick to Pure Data and Ardour and maybe some FOSS tracker for recording. When it comes to making tracks in the modern world, would an old dual core like that be able to keep up with even modest tracks?

hell yeah dude. Get some renoise up in there too. Bounce some VST tracks down to samples in renoise when you're using too much CPU.

Definitely worth trying.  If you aren't using the latest generation of cutting edge (i.e. high CPU) plugins then you really don't need much to have a good music machine.

I'm still doing all of my mixes on a ten year old rack server and the only time I ever have trouble is with Reaktor Blocks and Brusfri, both of which have a tendency to max out the core they're running on and give me buffering issues even though they don't push the total CPU load up by more than a few percent.  Even stuff that is considered a on the CPU intensive side by Gearslutz pedants, like the new TDR Limiter 6 in the "insane" quality mode or Klanghelm MJUC in HQ mode, is no problem - I've been using Limiter 6 as a track insert even, and it's manageable.

There are plenty of really good pieces of software that won't give you any trouble on a machine like that.  I was running Sunvox on a HP TC1100 tablet PC from 2002 with less than 1.5gb of RAM for years until the hard drive died last spring (eventually I'll revive it, I'm just too lazy to figure out how to mount an IDE to CF adapter in it without it rattling around) and I never once felt like I didn't have enough power to make a complete track.

Also, I know I'm borderline evangelical about them, but those Airwindows plugins sound fantastic and are mostly really light on the CPU (Chris apparently developed most of them on a Mac from the mid 2000s deliberately to force himself to work toward high performance and backward compatibility), so throw some of them on there for sure.

I think the Macbook Pro I just replaced had a Core 2 Duo. I don't think it ever kept me from doing anything musical that I wanted to. The reason I ended up buying a new one was that browsing the web had got unbearably slow, the USB ports started to become a bit dodgy and the replacement battery I bought last year also started acting up.

Generally I think that if electronic musicians in the late 90s could do all the amazing stuff on way worse hardware, it should be no problem to do it on a computer like that. After all you could always sample the more CPU intensive patches.

Definitely doable, I run a 1.8 ghz dell laptop from 2009 and just stick to stock plugins with a few vsts here and there. Just a case of resampling to audio often and keeping things simple.

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My home studio desktop is still core 2 duo 

Before I got the rack server (which is an insane machine by my standards - dual quad core processors at 2.1 gHz and 16gb of RAM and a hot swappable, 6 drive RAID array - that said, someone I know out in Portland saw the desktop version of the same model but without the RAID hardware on Craigslist for around $280 recently so it's still well into "low budget" territory today and was still significantly cheaper than  an average i5 laptop when I got mine) I was using a  Pentium 4 tower I got out of the trash for years and never really had an issue, and before that I used a PII 450mHz for like 7 years, from the late 90s when it was actually kind of fancy (it was the first and last computer I got new, when I went to college) until it filled up with hair from my roommate's cat and overheated around 2004. That PII was the last time I ever had issues with a computer feeling underpowered for what I wanted to do, and hat was because I'd switched to working in 24/48 which was more than it could really handle, especially with the big ball of cat hair already well developed.

CPU power is kind of overrated for electronic music in my book. 

This thread has made me wonder if dropping down to working in 16 bit rather than 24 would improve things for me. Probably not right?

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  On 11/28/2017 at 7:37 PM, Polytrix said:

This thread has made me wonder if dropping down to working in 16 bit rather than 24 would improve things for me. Probably not right?

 

 

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changing bitdepth might help yeah, but what would probably help more is changing sample rate.

Trouble is though, with some VSTs (like Reaktor) you hear really noticeable aliasing under 96kHz

I have a Macbook with a Core 2 Duo that I still use for live sets. All of the music making software works 100% fine.