In studios and on stage, flamboyant electronic music producers and DJs frequently use laptops customized with stickers and bespoke patches. In actuality, however, mobile computers may be just as essential a partner in recording environments for both professional and amateur composers, classical music arrangers, country crooners, etc. No matter what music you compose, one of the finest laptops for music production is frequently one of the essential pieces of equipment for any musician’s home studio. With the appropriate configuration, you can utilize laptops as portable studios thanks to reliable software tools, which have become indispensable for producers and artists.
Also, You may record, edit, and export your songs using various plug-in devices, including microphones, amps, instruments, MIDI controllers, samplers, and more. A wide variety of music production software enables you to record several tracks and provides a wealth of effects and editing options.
The minimum suggested’ specifications for a music laptop are a recipe for future frustration and the requirement for an early upgrade. Instead, it would help if you had a laptop with adequate power to handle modern applications, growing file sizes, and enough reserve capacity to address future demands.
Weight and portability are likely to be additional essential considerations for any DJs or touring musicians who are reading this book. Some of the most powerful, heftiest computers also weigh a fair lot, and carrying those monstrosities around will rapidly wear on your shoulders.
What will you see here?
Apple Macbook Pro 14 inch
The first in this list is the Macbook Pro 14-inch, the best of the best premium laptop with top-notch specs. However, you can opt for M1 Pro or M1 Max chip as per preferences; this doesn't affect the performance of this beast. It offers a sleek well-polished design with an aluminium build. You can opt up to 64GB of RAM coupled with an M1 Max chip that can handle all types of complex tasks with ease. Also, you can do all the graphics-intensive work without worrying about any delay or lag. Music producers mostly prefer Macbooks, because apple products coupled with macOS provide huge support for music production apps. Also, it comes with top-notch quality speakers compared to any other speakers, which makes it a perfect pick for music producers.
Coming with all types of necessary ports it provides a vast area of external devices to connect. Also, it offers a great battery life compared to other windows laptops. Despite the price, there isn't a more effective laptop for music creation.
ASUS ROG Strix Scar 15
Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 is one of the best laptops to choose from for music production if you're already in a windows environment. As it is a high-end gaming laptop, it offers top flagship-level specifications. This laptop gives all the gamer vibes through all the colors and key backlights, but you can use that power for the best music production. It comes with a Core i9 processor coupled with 16GB of RAM, which offers a lot of power for processing complex data & graphics-intensive work.
The battery will last 10 hours of video playing, and the laptop is light enough to be a portable powerhouse for content creation. In terms of ports, this laptop offers all the necessary ports for content creation, such as two USB-C ports (one Thunderbolt 4), two USB-A, HDMI, ethernet, and a headphone jack. Therefore, this laptop is a must if you're a hardcore music producer to display your style.
Apple MacBook Air M1
As we all know, intensive music production requires a high-end specs laptop or computer. However, what if you travel a lot and want a laptop that does music production while on the go? In that case, you can consider Macbook Air with an M1 chip. It offers a powerful processing chip by Apple (M1) coupled with 8GB-16GB of unified memory, which is a charm for music production. Also, it offers a sleek, compact & lightweight build with a fanless design. Therefore, it's portable and makes no noise while performing extensive work on the go. However, it offers decent stereo speakers.
The battery life of the Macbook Air is excellent; you may anticipate it to last 14 to 18 hours. As this laptop offers a fanless design this result in poor heat management & decreased performance when used for extended periods.
Dell XPS 17
The primary need of a music producer is powerful specifications & robust loudspeakers. However, if you want a laptop with a crisp & vivid display with powerful specs, you should consider getting your hands on Dell XPS 17. The most significant feature of Dell XPS 17 is the bright 17.0" FHD+ panel with InfinityEdge Non-Touch Anti-Reflective with brightness up to 500 nits. It comes with Intel Core i9-11980HK coupled with 64GB of DDR4-3200MHz RAM, which provides power-packed multitasking. Also, it comes with Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPU with 6GB of VRAM, which ensures that no matter what type of graphics-intensive work you throw, it won't cause any delay or lag.
Therefore, if you are a music producer working in a Windows environment and need a power-pack laptop with a premium design and decent speakers, you should definitely consider Dell XPS 17.
Microsoft Surface Pro 8
The most recent version of the highly regarded Microsoft Surface Pro series is a significant upgrade over the Surface Pro 7. The Surface Pro 8 is an outstanding improvement of Microsoft's flagship hardware product and can be very useful if you're interested in music production. It is 11.3 x 0.37 by 8.2 inches & weighs 1.96 pounds, making it a fairly portable computer in any case to carry. As it's a Microsoft Surface product, you will get a touchscreen with high refresh rates and will give all the iPad vibes. However, you can easily attach a keyboard through magnets and can use it like a normal laptop. Also, it offers some decent speakers at this body ratio.
It has a USB-C port which is good news, like the last gen Surface Pro 7. However, there's no USB-A now compared to the last-gen Pro 7. However, now it does support Thunderbolt-4. The base model features an Intel Core i7-1185G7 CPU coupled with 16GB of RAM & a 256GB SSD, which can perform heavy production tasks with ease & is enough to do graphics-intensive processing and be very helpful to a music producer or a content creator..
ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo 15
Last but not least in this list, Asus Zenbook Pro Duo 15 is the best high-end specs laptop which includes a powerful CPU like Core i9 from Intel. However, the most distinguishing feature that makes the Asus Zenbok Pro Duo a big deal for a music producer is a secondary display. It has a secondary unique high refresh rate touchscreen display right above the keyboard. The user can use this secondary screen in many ways, like providing extra music controls & equalizer, etc.
It offers a highly durable yet sleek build quality, power-packed with 16GB of RAM & flagship-level GPU from Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070, which can handle all graphics-intensive tasks & music processing with ease. Also, it has a beautiful big 15.6 inch 4K OLED touchscreen panel with a high refresh rate & 0.2ms touch sensitivity. However, this unique laptop does come at an expensive price & you will have to carry the adapter with you as with a dual display you cant expect a better battery life.
Is 16GB RAM sufficient for music production?
In actuality, 99% of producers won’t need more than 16GB of RAM, a solid-state drive, a 3.0GHz processor, and a few terabytes of storage. But some people will want to go even further. Any RAM capacity beyond 16GB would be excessive for a beginning manufacturer.
Is an i5 or i7 processor better for music production?
Depending on the virtual instruments and plugins you use, with 16 to 32 Gig of RAM. An i5 will probably be plenty for you if you’re running between one and twenty tracks. An i7 is an excellent processor for more than 20 tracks, say 100–120 tracks.
Conclusion
Selecting a laptop that can handle CPU-intensive music production tasks might be challenging. Some settings place a lot of emphasis on battery life. Others focus on performance and choose more powerful processors (CPUs) to make specific processes go quickly. We can readily understand how it isn’t easy to justify purchasing one model over another when we consider variations in screen sizes, aesthetics, and other factors.
Whether you’re making music or editing videos, there are certain qualities you’ll search for in a laptop. You specifically want the ideal balance of power, performance, and cost. We all wish the last bit didn’t matter, but it does. However, there is no need to panic since highly powerful laptops are now available at some very reasonable costs.
