A lot of the requirements will, of course, vary depending on what type of music you are going to record. Laptops have revolutionized how we work and play, but before purchasing your laptop a lot of factors need consideration. If you are into entertainment speakers for laptop should be a major factor. With plenty of different options, levels of portability, and sound quality MusicCritic can provide guidance in finding the best set of speakers for your needs. 

How complex is it? How many tracks will it consist of? Will it is mainly produced using MIDI or will it be all audio? How many tracks do you intend to record at one time? Are you recording an entire orchestra!? Will you be running hundreds of effects and/ or plugins?

You get the point. Not all music production needs are equal. But this guide should help you understand what to look for and why each one of the confusing technical specs is important to find the best laptop for music production.

If you follow this guide your laptop should be more than capable of recording fairly complex stuff, just about anything you would want to record in a home recording studio.

Well here is a guide of the key laptop specs for music production which I hope you find useful. I will end with my recommendation of which laptops I think are your best options.

Processor

You’ve probably heard phrases such as ‘dual-core’ and ‘quad-core’ or ‘i3’ and ‘i7’ banded around but without any explanation of what they mean. I will do my best to explain without confusing you further.

The computer processing unit (CPU) is arguably the most important thing to get right when looking at laptop spec for home recording. With more processing power your laptop will be able to perform more tasks simultaneously which is essential when recording music.

Storage capacity

It is our opinion that you have a hard drive of at least 256 GB. 500 GB is suitable, and 1 TB is ideal. But realistically, shoot for 512 GB SSD (Solid State Drive). An SSD has advantages in music production for more than one reason. Since SSDs are essentially flash memory, you won't have a lot of waiting time when loading up your sample libraries and pro audio plugins (a process that can take even minutes on typical hard drives). But also importantly, if you plan on using your laptop in live production, the bass vibration would prove disadvantageous to the mechanism of your hard drive.

Memory size

This allows data to be stored and accessed quickly. If you're in a creative flow, you don't want to hear a lot of pops and glitches in your music. A decent amount of RAM will help you with that.

Our suggestion is 8 GB. 6 GB is OK. A lot of sources say 4 GB is recommended, but in our opinion and experience, that is the base level and really unacceptable.