5 Best DJing Laptops (Lenovo, Asus, Dell, HP, Apple): $800 – $3000

I have been working with computers and audio for almost ten years now. For the past 3, I have been studying computer science full time. During this time, I have come to understand the requirements for an enjoyable and productive computing experience. Unfortunately, the computers I have used have been at times, geared towards the wrong capabilities which make it hard to run larger DJing platforms that demand a lot of memory. Fortunately, I have learned from my experience and thus, you won’t make the same mistakes that I did.

There are many requirements for a solid audio workstation. However, there are some specifications that are more necessary than others in an attempt to optimize your audio experience. In order to better understand each specification, I will go over them and explain the significance from an audio standpoint.

Continue reading

Ultimate guide to 7 best FL Studio 20 laptops (2018 June update)

This week I’ve got a massive post on picking a laptop for FL Studio (and in most ways – music production in general).

In this post I’m going to list out what are the specific requirements we’re targeting for, which laptops meet them for every price range and what you should do after getting a laptop. Time to find out what is the best laptop for FL Studio!

Without further ado.

2018 June update. Last month Image Line released FL Studio 20 so I’ve decided to do an update on recommended laptops for FL Studio including the best laptops available in 2018 Summer and beyond.

What are we looking for?

A good place to start would be FL Studio 20 minimum requirements:

  • 2 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 / AMD Athlon 64 (or later) compatible CPU with full SSE2 support
  • WINDOWS 7 or later / macOS 10.11 or later
  • 4 GB or more RAM recommended
  • 4 GB free disk space
  • Soundcard with DirectSound drivers. ASIO/ASIO2 compatible required for audio recording

Looking at these requirements it seems that any recently released laptop would be more than enough. Well… yes and no. It might be enough to launch FL Studio but it is far from what you need if you’re using VSTs and sample libraries. Apparently some known plugin libraries have significantly higher requirements than FL Studio itself.

So do these requirements actually say anything?

I’d argue that the only thing that you should take from these requirements is that video card doesn’t matter at all and hard drive space matters only if you have an extensive sample library.

FL Studio team have written a lot more sensible guide for choosing a PC but that is mostly focused on desktop/tower setup.

In sum, it seems that we need to form our own custom requirements one by one.

Let’s dive in.

Continue reading