Hello everyone! Can you share your experiences with music production on Framework laptops? Things like battery life, current DAW, CPU performance, current setup and overall experience? I am considering switching from MacBook Pro M1.
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I’ve recorded 68 sessions on my framework laptops now. Most were on my 11th-gen FW13 on Ableton 11, which worked well enough, although I would get CPU warnings at high sample rates/small buffers, especially with the high quality conversion selected in audio options. But recording at 44.1khz or 48khz was generally fine, with 5-7 inputs armed and recording.
On my FW16, performance is better, in that I can record 96khz with 10 inputs and not worry about the CPU at all. I’d guess the newer FW13 boards probably do okay as well. On the other hand, Ableton seems to have some trouble with the platform, especially since version 12 came out. The UI is often non-responsive for minutes at a time on large sessions (playback and recording don’t stop, but it’s very annoying with editing and mixing). I’m not sure if this would affect most users, as I generally am recording clips that are hours long, rather than many small clips/scenes.
Yesterday, I actually installed Ubuntu and Bitwig to try recording a session that way, and was extremely impressed. Bitwig is nice and snappy and never unresponsive, even with multiple multi-hour sessions open and 10+ input channels recording. Unlike Ableton and Win11, which is hesitant to fill up my RAM, this setup was not shy about using 20+GB for fs cache, which I suspect is the main difference. As a result, I think I’ll be switching my workflow over for good.
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