$249…
This looks like it could be a cool machine for doing Renoise native stuff… no plugins or external devices, just samples and Renoise native tools.
Would it do the trick?
I’ve Renoised on a eee PC with Windows7, 2GB Ram, 20GB SSD, and 1.6ghz CPU. It worked fine using only samples as a “make ideas while traveling” machine. Used a USB-memory as storage for all samples and songs.
Yes why not. For a workflow more like traditional 2nd gen trackers, but with a little extra air for dsp where it is bitterly needed…
But native dsp also uses some cpu. You still have to restrain yourself on usage. Also number of voices, the new filters and long release can be very intense, renoise sadly has no way to limit the number of nna voices for an instrument. Also I have 100% native instruments eating 60% of a 3 ghz xeon core, with enough filters and distortions stacked in it… The native dsp is a bit easier than the top shots vsts, but still needs some power to calculate.
I once put renoise 3.1 on an old amd c-50 netbook. The screen was too small for me to work on music at that moment, I only used it to work on some lua stuff on the road to kill boredom with productivity. Renoise ran fine, a bit more sluggish in the interface than I was used to, but it ran. I think it played most demo songs after cranking up the latency. not stuff like dblue tension though, I remember that track being way ott for the processor. I think I will revive it, as some sort of sketch book for musical ideas - for sound design I rather wait for the workstation with more cpu at hand…
You also have to consider…these slim notebooks are more thought like mobile surfing, word processing, chatting, and video via gpu decoding, in power saving mode, nothing that really strains the cpu. Music production will put more strain on the cpu, leading to more heat and power consumption than the thing was thought for. Some models might be better in that regard than others. The other market niche would be gaming notebooks, that are designed to handle intense workloads, cooling wise and by the capacity of the battery. Those would be ideal to run daws without restrictions, but are expensive. Just take care you can bring it back in case heavier renoise projects would make the thing too hot or too loud to work with, or drain the battery in too little time.