Hello!

so my old laptop is starting to show its age and i decided to upgrade to a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 with an I7, (i think) 16gb ram and a 256gb solid state hard drive. Has anyone done much production with an surface pro? Ill be using FL Studio and right off the start i noticed issues with ASIO4ALL, has anyone else? the only other issue i see being is that i use a focusrite 2i4 sound card and it would have to be interfaced with the Surface Pro Dock. has anyone has any experience with the dock? i want to know what im getting into before i dump money into add on crap for my surface for production or if i should just suck it up and get a designated production computer.


Thanks

some people like to produce on their laptops and some on their computers

i was producing on my laptop in the beginning and then after 5 years the battery died, then i was without ableton for 4 days and i went insane while the battery was getting replaced

so i bought a computer with good specs

i really recommend a computer because its just so much better CPU wise, cause plugins start to hog the CPU, like kontakt lol, you can upgrade the specs after awhile too

the laptop still is good when you're on the go or you want to be elsewhere

Sometimes I wish that people actually knew what they were talking about before answering in a thread.

The Surface Pro handles Photoshop image processing better than a 2015 MacBook Pro(cnet review).  How it works on audio I don´t know.

I think you should check with the FL twitter account.  They´ll probably give you some pointers.

Thank you! will do.

Yep. If you make music just at home, buy a desktop PC. Just for the the upgradability alone.

If you are on the go, I'd go for regular laptop with active cooling. (Meaning a fan and a heatpipe.)

Those really slim laptops / tablet-laptop hybrids tend to have really small fan, or are even passive cooled. (Meaning the heatpipe is not cooled by fan, but by being connected to casing of the device.) What can happen is that eventhough you have i7 in there, it get's so hot inside that the processor reduces it's working frequency (thus power) in order to cool itself down, so it doesn'd damage itself. That's called throttling. Computing realtime multitrack audio with bunch of virtual sound sources is a quite demanding task, so you don't want throttling to be present too much. I didn't have the honor to use those Surfaces, but I'd be really careful while thinking about them for this job.

So if I were you and there was no option to go for desktop PC, I'd buy laptop that is not built so sleek, but has proper cooling inside. Gaming laptops are kind of cool for this, actually, as they are designed for heavier load, but don't cost you money of a proffesional workstation. ...they tend to be plastic-ish and bulky, though. But then it comes down to your priorities.

EDIT: To end it on positive note though, if you already have the Suface Pro, just test if it doesn't overheat under your usual load. (load some finished project and play it) Then if the CPU power is enough for you, you're good to go as you are.

As a fully multi-touch compatible DAW, you might be better off with Bitwig (I read you were going to use FL) when going for a Surface.

http://www.bitwig.com/en/bitwig_1_3/

As a fully multi-touch compatible DAW, you might be better off with Bitwig (I read you were going to use FL) when going for a Surface.

http://www.bitwig.com/en/bitwig_1_3/

iv never used bitwig but after checking out the web site it essentially seems, and looks, the same as FL Studio. i'll have to check it out, thanks for the recommend.

My partner has a SP3 and I've spent some time messing around with FLS 12 on it. It worked reasonably well but started to stutter after a few instances of massive and some fx. This was with the basic i5 model.

I recently bought a yoga 3, which is similar to the surface but with a flip keyboard. It has an i7 and haven't run into any issues as of yet. A desktop or beefier laptop is probably ideal but I only wanted to spend around 1100.

The biggest issue I have is screen size. Everything is pretty small on FLS12 with a 13" screen unless you tweak the resolution settings and use scaled mode. With my 27" desktop monitor this isn't an issue.

The Surface pro 3 is definitely a capable computer, I have the original surface and I've ran Ableton and photoshop on there but I can tell you right now you'll probably run into space issues with that 256GB SSD.