composing on a budget

Hi everyone,

I'm a French musician on a budget, but I would be really glad to go so far as to purchase a computer along with the sacred Logic pro

I can only afford the first models of refurbished Macbook pro (with 8Go Ram, 128Go SSD, core i5 1,4 GHz)

I already have another computer for daily use, so this new one would be entirely dedicated to Logic. I could acquire an external hard drive later on as for the storage.

I'm a very beginner yet, but I would say that I don't intend to pile like 80 tracks up and I'll be just fine without Kontakt for the time being. I don't mind if it takes some time to frequently adjust the buffer or freeze some tracks.

Do you guys believe in my plan ? Or am I being way too optimistic on this one ?

Thanks a lot anyway

128G of storage is SO little; if that's what you do, get an external 1 or 2TB drive, and store projects there when they're not current; you need to have breathing room on the internal drive, and logic (with all it's loops, sounds, etc) eats up a LOT of space (be selective on what you download for logic).

really, 256G should be the bare minimum; apple knows this, too....

Ok thanks for your answer.

On the Apple website they say "6GB of available storage space for minimum installation or 72GB of storage space for full Sound Library installation".

If I download the aforementioned full library, and store no more than 3 - 4 projects in the computer, by storing the other ones in an external drive, do you think it will work well ?

My other concern was the RAM, I saw several dudes on youtube who beleive that 8GB will only make it work at a push. Is it really the case if I only use Logic for all the instruments ?

16gb ram is better, but 8gb should suffice.

what i would do: make sure no apps are set to open on reboot, and no (non-urgent) items are in the login items (in system preferences>users & groups).

restart, and open ONLY logic, so as much of the system resources and ram, are available for logic.

the OS takes up storage space, apps as well. and with 72GB of logic files, you'll eat up all of that 128g. and what about other music, photos? videos? etc. all add up. so, try to go for at least the 256G drive.

if you do the 128, don't download all the logic content! be selective as you can be.

you can of course store projects on an external drive, and keep what you're currently working on on the macbook (especially if you want mobility). and try to keep about 20% of your hard drive available at all times... a major challenge if you've only got 128g to begin with.

good luck with this!

Most-important to any hardware purchase decision is that "it is recent." Recent-enough to allow(!) the installation of the most-recent operating system, Catalina, and its several successors.

Call it "planned obsolescence" or what-have-you, but Apple will not permit(!) the installation of its most-recent software on not-most-recent hardware.

Ok thanks a lot for your advice !

Regarding the storage of other music, photos or videos, the thing is I don't intend to have any of this on the computer.

But I definitely get the point, so I think I'm going to wait until I can afford a better, newer, (faster, stronger) device !

Thanks a lot once again for taking the time to give me answers