Speed, power, and storage capacity that can rival some of the top desk top models, throw in the portability factor and it's a no-brainer. You don't need a big desk top anymore to have a powerful computer to run your home recording studio.

Laptops in general have become very powerful in the last couple years and now there are a few models that are designed specifically for us music makers. This also means your hardware compatibility headaches and problems are over.

What made this change-over so appealing to me at first was the portability of it all as I travel a bit and the idea of sitting on a plane or hotel and working on a song's arrangement or mix was exiting.

You can also take your home studio to another home or even pro studio and integrate your project into their set up or simply transfer your tracks. Having this option has saved me lots of time and money as well as improving on some of the quality of some tracking I wasn't able to do at home. After which, you simply pack up your laptop and go plug it back into your own home studio with all those new tracks to play around with.

Which laptop?

The choice for PC users has come down to this: Intel Core 2 Duo Pro. Luckily for us, they have tweeked these laptops and made them truly high performance music production machines. The key point here is the Intel Core Duo CPU processors. Yup, two processors to make these laptops run many times faster than any high powered desk top you may have be using.

Everything from the CPU to the FireWire card to the optical mouse has been designed to make these laptops a high powered studio recording machine. No need to worry about the chipset models or if you have the right soundcard anymore. Take it out of the box and hook it up and start recording... really. (For laptop model and a full list of features see link below).

Mac Computers

Same thing applies to macs. The new Mac Powerbooks have Intel core 2 duo as well, making them faster than anything we've seen yet. These are truly amazing at only 1 inch in thickness and up to 4 Gig's of memory and 250 Gig hard drives. Two CPU's will ensure your sessions don't get bogged down in speed or freeze. Applications like Final Cut Pro or any other video editing will take advantage of the dual processors.

Considering these kind of features and their portability and small usage space on your desk, any home recording studio enthusiast would be crazy to even think about a big ol' desk top anymore.