The most sure fire way of removing the headache from selecting a laptop is to pop along to someone who knows what they are doing. If you pick up a laptop from a specialist Audio PC builder then you can feel assured that the DPC latency will be under control (see Part 1), and it would have been tested with numerous audio interfaces. However, regardless of the marketing materials, no laptop is going to be "designed for audio". With desktop computers Audio PC specialists can carefully choose and combine components to produce a system that will work well for music production. With laptops this isn't possible. Unless you order direct from the Far East in large container loads then you are not going to get any say over what goes inside a laptop. Audio PC builders have to rebrand and sell someone else's laptop.

Finding the right laptop for music production can be rather troublesome. With a desktop computer you can select a few good components, screw the thing together, tweak Windows and you're off making music. With a laptop there's no real knowing what's inside the box and you certainly couldn't build one yourself. So, you have to make a choice, take a stab, and hope for the best.

The thing is that it really should just work. You should be able to buy a laptop, plug in a compatible interface, install some software and make some music - why would that be difficult? In many cases it's not and often people do exactly that, but sometimes you can run into trouble with audio dropouts, glitching, clicks and pops or simply a refusal to work.

Mastering is one of the few creative processes that still finds itself quite high up on a pro-audio pedestal. The creation of music, the recording, mixing and production is all within the hands of the home user but mastering still seems to be just out of reach. I've read a lot of articles that support the idea that mastering is somehow special, or more professional, the reserve of hardened and wizened mastering engineers with mystical powers of "finishing". I'm a great supporter of professionals in any field of creativity, but I'm also a supporter of the guy who's doing it at home and just wants to make some music and get it out there - that's what PC Music Guru is all about.

I'm sorry it's taken so long to get to this point but things became insanely busy for a while there. It's all good though as it's enabled me to build a number of Windows 7 systems with a range of audio interfaces - it's almost all good news. Over the last month loads of drivers have become available making life so much easier for everyone. The craziest thing is that on the whole, everything seems to be working. In terms of software there's very little reason why something wouldn't install and run, even older programs, and with Windows 7 compatibility functions where it can install something in Vista or Windows XP mode then as yet I can't find anything that won't - except Pro Tools of course (no surprises there).



 So let's have a look at what i've got working so far and what issues I encountered, if any.

Software

Roger Linn's Adrenalinn III is one of the most creative and interesting guitar effects boxes in the world today. It's able to produce the most mind boggling delay and beat syncing effects all designed by the man who created the Linn drum machine back in 1979 which essentially gave birth to the sampled drum machine. Many moons later he re-emerged with this weird guitar effects box which also has built in guitar amp models and all sorts of wonderful jiggery pokery. I really fancied one but i'm not into hardware effects any more and there seemed to be loads of stuff in the box that I didn't need - i just wanted his amazing beat synced rhythms. Well, into my inbox this morning popped an email from Roger announcing the release of the plug-in version called Adrenalinn Sync which contains all the wonderfully delay stuff and none of the extras - perfect!

All righty then, the computer is all together, fresh and clean, the BIOS is set to boot from the CD/DVD drive. Plonk the Windows 7 disk into the drive and let's get it going. Just to note that I'm installing Windows 7 Pro 64bit so if you're using a different version there might be some slight differences. I also got my camera out for some old school screen shots so please excuse the shakiness but hopefully they're helpful. To be honest though, it was really easy so just follow the instructions and you'll be fine.

1. Start the computer – put Windows 7 disk into the optical drive.




2. A message saying “Press a key to boot from CD” may come up in which case press a key!




3. The CD drive will spin up and you'll be told that “Windows is loading files...”.

Every year Intel manages to come up with new desktop technology. That means a new type of processor plus all the associated bits and pieces required to make it work – processor, socket size, chipset, motherboard, CPU fan, so when upgrading to the latest Intel technology you are essentially buying a new computer. With AMD they've gone down a much more wholesome route where each new processor can be dropped into your existing motherboard (usually), but still, Intel drive the technology and in forcing the creation of new motherboards it allows other technologies to advance along with it. So, we have the latest PCI Express slots, the latest LAN and audio architectures, but they are also quick to lose older technologies like floppy drive support and IDE drive support forcing you to buy new and move on.

Lot's of new stuff about, time to bring my rickety old system up to date with a bit of an overhaul. Thought you might like to join me in the process of building a brand spanking new system for music making with the latest Intel Core i5 processor and the all new Windows 7. I'm going to split it up into parts to make it more manageable and spread it over a few days:

In view of all the new Intel technology turning up and of course Windows 7 we thought it would be a good time to put some searching and penetrating questions to a builder of audio computers. Rain Recording has been running for 3 years in the UK (a few more in the States) offering a range of computers designed for music production. It's headed up by musician, author, technical whiz and all round PC music guru Robin Vincent.

PC-Music.com – So what's your computer music experience up to this point?

Never been that fond of sample CD's or the increasingly common sample CD released as a virtual instrument. They tend to be a bit too specific, can work well together but often it's hard to find sounds that could be used elsewhere. They can also be expensive, justified by the enormous library in which you can only find a handful of really usable sounds. So it wasn't with enormous enthusiasm that I responded to Cinematique Instruments offer to try some of their samples. Glancing at their list of instruments I was immediately roused from my apathy by the odd mix - it was a small selection but very unexpected. No less unexpected was the price - a handful of Euros for individual instruments, this is much more like it.