Music Production on a Netbook

It wasn’t that long ago that producing music (in a  Windows environment) in your bedroom required a powerful desktop PC, or if you wanted to make music on the go, you would need to carry around a large, heavy laptop (that would usually run like a furnace).

However, after receiving my Acer Ferrari One netbook last week, I decided to see how it performs when running Propellerhead’s latest software: Reason 5 (although Reason 6 will be released at the end of September).

To install it, I had to use an external USB DVD drive (as the netbook doesn’t have an optical drive) and the whole program installed in under 10 minutes.

Once complete, Reason took about 20 seconds to load up, and I was presented with the demo song.



Reason 5 Splash Screen

I spent a couple of hours playing around with Reason 5, and it is excellent.


The Rack

It runs incredibly smoothly, with virtually no loading times, no slowdowns, and even runs well using only the built-in soundcard in the netbook (I also tried it using my M-Audio Fastrack USB soundcard).


The Sequencer

This truly shows how far netbooks and music production programs alike have come in terms of performance and optimization.

CoreTemp and Task Manager running alongside Reason

Reason 5 uses between 30 to 50 percent of the CPU (although it can go up to 100% when using a lot of virtual instruments, and about 500 to 750mb of RAM (again, this will go up when using more instruments).

My Acer Ferrari One was running at around 42 to 45 degrees Celsius after about 3 hours of using Reason, which is pretty good considering the CPU was under load for most of that time.



The Acer Ferrari One running Reason 5

Overall, I am very impressed with the potential of the Acer Ferrari One and how well Reason 5 runs on it. Propellerhead have done an excellent job in making Reason so resource-light, and it is a great tool for the mobile-music producer.