Traktor Pro on MSI Wind Netbook!

Hello Everyone - I Hope you are all enjoying your holidays!

Anyway I had some extra money left over from my Christmas Bonus/Presents to buy some toys & thought I would buy a netbook to mess around with (I'm an Apple user except for my PC at the office)-maybe do a few mods and have a bit of geek time. I did a bit of research and decided on the MSI Wind (easy to install OSX, price etc). This morning I installed an extra gig of ram (maximum allowed is 2 gig) and I also intend to install a 7200 rpm 200 GB hard drive that I have lying around but I haven't done that yet.
Long story short- this little thing rocks ! It's like the little engine that could! I've installed T Pro on it and I am using an Audio 8 DJ, Hercules RMX & Korg Nanokontrol. Now I've only been messing about for a couple of hours but so far no crashes. I've had 2 decks going and tried two effects turned all the way up & the CPU usage got up to about 50% This is all under windows, mind you, as I haven't installed the Mac OSX hack yet- I'll do that later on this week. I'm still messing around with latencies but it is defintiely exceeding my expectations (which were quite low, to be honest). I also updated the BIOS on the wind to 1.09 which allows you to overclock the cpu by as much as 24% which definitely seems to help.Now I'm not saying anyone should expect to be using this as their main computer but for messing about with it's working really well. I'm going to try it out with Ableton tonight and see how that goes. I'll keep you updated on my progress with latencies and the like. It could be a possibility that if someone were looking for a machine to do some light gigging with it would work out well. I get a bit nervous dragging my Aluminum Macbook around to gigs (there have been a few near misses with accidents) but if the Wind were to fall on the ground or something like that it wouldn't be as much of a loss (Although I am quickly becoming more fond of it!)

p.s.- I am a very loyal Apple fan, have been for many years now but recently I can't help but feel a little disillusioned with the company & I'm sort of regretting having bought a new Macbook when they came out. Steve Jobs can suck it if he thinks that the netbook isn't rapidly becoming an important aspect of the market. It's been really cool going to the different forums and seeing all of the hacks and mods that people are doing- loads of people who are Apple users that wanted a netbook and weren't getting it so they made their own.

 

You should probably try Live ver.5 which was made for that kind of CPU. I am considering getting a netbook too, why taking main computer to a club, risking someone stealing it or spilling , whatever. Traktor is so easy on CPU compared to Live or reason so those netbooks should be OK. I want to check Lenovo since it has express slot so could use Indigo.
If you have performance problem check nLite XP. I used to do it years ago having XP with no network and just 7 services default -70MB. The performance difference compared to regular OS was huge.

 

Hi.. I have tried with my MSI Wind U100, with TPro and OSX
It´s runs with no problems at all, and with Audio Dj 8..
My only trouble is the small screen and the resolution 1024x600..
It´s 200 pixels to small.. it should be 1024x800, and it takes all the space from the Traktor Browser at the bottom..

I tried with Traktor in XP, but that was no succes at all, no memory resources at all. And slow as hell...

 

What's interesting about the above results, if proven to be consistently true over time and use, is that others who are considering purchasing more traditional laptops for use w/ Traktor now have a reference point as to how 'high-end' the laptop really needs to be.

 

My thoughts exactly ... i am in the process of trying to buy a laptop for use with Traktor but read so much conflicting info about how cheap laptops just wont run it etc etc ...

Ive now read here that someone is usinga netbook ... and that traktor is so easy on teh CPU compared to ithers ...

Aaaarrrrggghhhhh my head hurts!

 

Traktor is lighter, certainly. Ran better on my old G4 powerbook (1.3 Ghz G4, 768 megs of RAM) than Torque or Mixxx. However, I kinda had to upgrade as pro is x86 only, boooo. That said, the old powerbook is way faster than my netbook, there's no way that I would want to be riding line all the time, in terms of I/O, memory, screen real estate and so forth.

Yeah, there's a lot of conflicting information. Essentially, Traktor pro is a bit perilous on what is essentially a 900Mhz pentium class machine (the Atom 1.6Ghz performs like that). It also doesn't fit properly on the fricken' screen. Ahem. Peace and love.

Ok, so I run Traktor on a Macbook Pro. It's pricey, but lovely to use, my decision, and total overkill. A non-pro 13 inch (?) macbook would be my personal choice if I were shopping for a dedicated Traktor machine right now, as I just don't like doing audio on my Windows machines.

I probably could have got away just fine with a cheap laptop though- there are plenty of 2.0Ghz+ dual core machines that aren't much more expensive than a netbook, and tonnes faster- they just aren't as svelte for transport. They tend to have much better screens as well, the average netbook screen is too small for my liking, when running audio apps- and are actually too low res to display traktor pro properly. A chunky, cheap but fast laptop would be a much better option than a netbook and in the same price range too.

I still say "go for a cheap laptop, not a netbook". It will do the job, for sure. You haven't saved anything if you buy a marginally cheaper netbook, but need to replace it with a "proper" machine later. If you're buying a machine for Traktor specifically, it's probably a good idea to get one that meets the minimum specs, or you won't get much sympathy when you have problems.

It's cool to show a proof of concept, to amaze people with things running on ridiculously small machines, but you'd want shooting if you ran Pro on one, and relied on it for anything other than novelty value. It would be in the "upgrading the software just before a set" category of daft. It's a headache you don't need. Meet the required specs or face being told to bog off by support.

Disclaimer, netbooks are cool as hell, I love mine, but it's used for a bit of writing/browsing/email, not for anything where weird performance black ice could be an issue.

Oh yeah, and Bustedkarma- that's so very cool, props to ya

Now get Ableton up and synched too, and you just might destroy the universe. I'm completely with you on Apple's arrogance over netbooks (well, on everything really), as well. That said, there's a revamped mini out soon (with halfway decent video subsystem even). I wouldn't be amazed if they didn't make a netbook sometime soon, based on similar guts. Right now, the Air as their ultraportable is a bit of a middle finger to the world- in terms of bang per buck, and indeed just pure bang, bloody thing.

 

Nice post ... i'm not thinkiing of getting a netbook for the job at all but when searching the forums you see all sorts of stuff like a £3-£400 laptop just wont cut it when in actual fact you can get a lappy for that price that blitz's the min spec. also you even tend to find teh apple crowd saying macbook pro or nothing else which totally stumped the idea of getting a mac for the job. Now i know that a normal macbook will do the job it opens up new windows.

Hmmmmmmmmmmm decisions decisions!

 

I like the idea of a Macbook opening up new Windows -

I run Traktor fine on a 13" Macbook - it cost me just over £500 from the refurb bit on Apple's web store - having said that I then upgraded the RAM and the HD so that took it to about £600.

Having said that a slightly bigger screen would be nice for Pro and I do use it just for music so it isn't cluttered up with anything else to maybe slow it down.

I think it's worth remembering that an element of "willy waving" can creep in when people are telling you about their computer specs ...

... oh and I agree with Ancipital on Apple's arrogance and the Air - it's more of a fashion accessory than a computer.

 

Double click the transport areas on a 1024 x 600 netbook to let you see more browser tracks.
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The fact that mac osx runs so sweet on atom 1.6Ghz is dangerous for apple - so many people run hacks with basically only network errors - mine runs my traktor 3.4 in osx no problem but no NAS drive obviouslky.

 

Fact is, Apple really need to get a revamped mini on the market, and a cheap notebook based around similar guts- they've been dragging their heels for ages. Windows is in a funny place right now- XP is looking old and long in the tooth, and a lot of folks don't like Vista, so there's an opening there. You can tell from the win7 public beta that Redmond are spooked.

The time and effort that people are putting in to get OSX up on their netbooks shows that there's an appetite for it, yes- and if Apple don't distract those people with affordable but attractive hardware, a culture of running their OS on third party hardware will spring up- and they didn't like that before when they licensed it, the sure as heck won't like it now

 

Or you could assign a hotkey to toggle layout, (make sure you have your last 2 layouts as the one you use/one with all the browsers minimised). Then when you want to see your tracks just hit the hotkey. You could also assign hotkeys to load selected tracks into Deck ABCD, that way the small screen would become less of a problem.

Fus
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Sorry I forgot you're using TPro, in which case just assign the hotkey to browser toggle, and you'll see the browser full screen.

 

any further updates on how this is performing? have you had any issues when runing 4 decks, efx, recording, etc all at the same time?

i love the idea of using a 10 inch laptop, but the atom has had some bad press about its general weediness! saying that im using "non pro" traktor scratch on the 1st gen EEE PC

 

Hey there.
I too am curious about how the MSI Wind has been working for you for audio purposes.
Can you run a few simultaneous clips with a couple of effects in Ableton Live? Does it get super hot, with fans blaring? Did you install OS X, and if so can you run the applications within OS X?

Very curious. Thanks!

Thanks

 

Hi guys!

I'm REALLY curious about audio latencies you have with netbooks + hercules RMX + traktor!

I could buy expensive 12" laptop, but I really love these netbooks (Acer Aspire One / EEEPC901). Also in gigs where normally is 2xcdj + mixer a smaller setup is always better

I've been joggling between 12" p7350 laptop and netbooks for a while now ... and some decent proof of traktor working well in netbook would be nice

 

Did this work on an MSI WIND running OSX....Updates please, inquiring minds want to know.

 

Traktor Pro will not work on a msi wind. You might have a chance if you buy the new one (atom n280) and install 2G of ram and OSX.

I got T3.4 to work pretty good on my acer netbook @39.5ms latency using my audio8 and my 2 controllers. (2 decks, fx & hq keylock)

 

there are videos on youtube of people using netbooks with traktor (osx i think). but it's way too unreliable. just think of the latency (something about 40ms)...

 

traktor pro doesn't run well, it will stutter when you are seeking trough tracks when monitoring.

but traktor 3.4 works great.