What Mac do I need to run LA Scoring Strings comfortably? Later, with more libraries?

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I'm thinking of buying a Mac to do composition work. I want to start out just with LASS to start. What minimum Mac do I need to run it comfortably? Not a MacBook Pro, at least an iMac, correct?

In the future if I feel like my skills are at a higher level and I need more libraries to broaden my palette, would the most cost effective way to run L.A. Scoring Strings, Hollywood Strings, and Symphobia simultaneously be to host them on a PC server with many disks in RAID (SSD when prices go down), then stream to a Mac running a sequencer?

So hosting on a server would relieve the Mac of the most resourcing-taxing process of loading up the samples? If I use a PC server as the slave, what Mac would I need?

Thanks in advance for any advice you can give me.
 

robduckyworth


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Your Mac's Specs
15" MBP, 2.5GHz i7, 750GB, 6770M 1GB, iPad 3, iPhone 4, custom PC
Macbook Pros are more than capable of running high end Music applications. In fact, you will find that most professionals in the industry own one.

How big are the sample libraries involved with this application, out of interest?

Instead of streaming form a PC raid array you could consider buying a dedicated Thunderbolt array. the bandwidth would be far higher and you wouldn't see any lag that way.
 
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Hey, thanks for the reply.

EastWest Hollywood Strings (Diamond): 310GB free hard drive space / iLok Security Key (not supplied). Specs. It's the only sampling library that gives you the optimal, not just required, whopping specs of 8-core, 16GB RAM...

LA Scoring Strings: 16.4 GB with loss-less compressed audio files (approximately 24 GB uncompressed). Specs

SYMPHOBIA requires 18 GB of free disk space for complete installation. Specs

Would having some sort of RAID configuration speed up loading times? I've heard complaints with EastWest Hollywood Strings that without SSDs there's a noticeable wait time to get the samples to load into RAM, but SSDs are not an option budget-wise (would probably need to get 512GB), Thunderbolt or not...Also, I've heard that Symphobia and LA Scoring Strings' sounds are similar to Hollywood Strings but more effecient. Now that I think about it, I really need to save up money if I want to compose with virtual libraries. I've yet to learn how to just do it with piano, pen, and paper like John Williams has always done it...By the time I feel skilled enough to use these kinds of libraries, prices for SSDs will be the same as HDDs :p

I guess my deciding which Mac to get for composing will boil down to whether I want to run Hollywood Strings on it. I don't foresee myself composing on the go, so I might just save up for a used Mac Pro.
 

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