Rain Recording make audio-ready notebooks – that is, they’re pre-tested to function well with audio software, with Windows tweaks, driver selection, and configuration all chosen and tested for music and visual production, and no crapware installed. They’re one of a handful of music-friendly vendors that does that (see also: PCAudioLabs, etc.). Given that the PC music making experience can range from awesome to awful depending on which hardware and (particularly) drivers you’re on, that’s no small matter.

Rain has always styled themselves a premium brand. But the latest Diablo really does go to extremes spec-wise. It’ll cost you – base price starts at US$4000, though that’s not as high-end as these sort of desktop specs commanded more recently. Intel and AMD/ATI really are economizing, even at the high end. But cost aside, this machine really maxes out components. You have to admire the results:

• Quad CPUs: up to 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Quad 12MB/1066 MHz “Montevina” Centrino 2 — the most powerful brain you can put in a laptop right now
• Up to 8 GB DDR3 RAM (and if you boot a 64-bit operating system like Vista x64 or – cough – Linux, you can use all of it)
• ATI Radeon MR HD3870/512M DDR3 RAM — just about the most powerful GPU (and some people do prefer ATI to NVIDIA), giving you up to two discrete GPUs
• 17″ display at 1920×1200
• Optional dual 320GB 7200RPM SATA drives with 16MB cache
• 1x eSATA, 3X USB2, 3xFireWire (yeah, you read that right – one onboard FireWire, plus two more using a bundled, TI chipset PCI ExpressCard that pops into that slot, also standard on the lower-cost LiveBook)
• 1 x HDMI, 1 x VGA, card reader, headphone out, mic in, gigabit RJ45 Ethernet, fingerprint scanner

The key specs, of course, are the quad CPU, that ATI GPU, and the maxed-out-res 17″ display. Given those specs, the weight actually isn’t all that bad – 8 lbs. with the 12-cell battery (which you’re going to want, as this machine is likely to suck up electricity in a hurry).

ExpressCard slots on new Mac and PC notebooks look tantalizing, but buyer beware: adding FireWire audio can be perilous. Multichannel FireWire interfaces work beautifully with the proper drivers and controller, but get some element of that equation wrong, and you may find your high-end interface is rendered unusable (think glitches and dropouts). The chipset in the controller and in the laptop can have an impact, but having a TI (Texas Instruments) controller in your ExpressCard seems to be a good start.

Speaking of Rain Recording, Rain is about the only vendor I’ve found that offers a 2-port FireWire ExpressCard known to work well with audio interfaces. Now, your mileage may vary depending on the chipset in your laptop, but based on what I’ve been hearing, this looks like a good option. I’ve also seen a cheap (US$30) card floating around some random Internet vendors; it’s so cheap, I’m probably going to buy one just to see if it works. I’ll report back.

2 Port FireWire Express Card (formerly ADS Tech PYRO1394a) [Rain Recording]

I get nothing out of this, for the record; Rain actually hopes you’ll get this card with one of their laptops, but I’m just as curious to hear how it works on other machines. Of course, this would be a nice add-on not only for PCs, but also potentially for MacBook Pro users wanting dedicated FW400 ports and the TI controller – theoretically, at least. Let us know what happens if you take the plunge.

If you’ve had experience with different chipsets and ExpressCard slots on Mac or PC, we’d love to hear it. And I hope to offer my own tests soon.

Updated: The StarTech EC13942 also shares the TI chipset and is available from a number of vendors if that’s a vendor you prefer. It’s the only one endorsed by PreSonus aside from this former ADS Tech card that Rain sells — and may give you better results with other, non-PreSonus hardware, based on reports I’ve read. See PreSonus’ official word on the matter:

Presonus Hardware Compatibility: Approved Chipsets [PDF]

One of the things that attracts me to computers: choice. So it’s worth noting that you do have choices when looking to laptops, PCs included. (This sounds like those lame “We know you have a choice in your travel plans” announcements you get on airplanes. Unlike those choices, though, these are genuinely different – thankfully.)

So let’s cut straight to the chase: there is a choice between Mac and PC, and there are choices on PC that keep it competitive (to say nothing of Linux). If you’re looking for a rig that runs PC-only tools like FL Studio, and you want more hardware choice to get there without being locked into a Mac, Boot Camp, and an extra Windows license, you have options.

Rain Recording has just introduced a revised pro laptop offering. You may have seen the announcement around, but I did get to talk to them while they were developing this, so I want to offer my own, semi-biased reflections. Rain is a custom system builder focused on music and audio applications. They and a handful of vendors like them do test their configurations with actual audio software, which isn’t generally the case with bigger PC laptop makers. And they offer music and audio-specific support, beyond even what Apple can offer.

Now, that said, I have to say I haven’t actually been that blown away by what custom builders have been able to do in the laptop space. The problem is, builders don’t have the kinds of options with laptops that they do with desktops; traditionally, you’ve needed huge manufacturing scale to get many choices. Even a lot of big brands get someone else to make their machines, so custom builders really face an uphill battle with limited barebones systems. Rain and others have put together some interesting systems, but at a price premium and generally lagging some of the hardware options on the mainstream laptops. For that reason, many PC users have chosen to stick it out with “commodity” machines and try to navigate to the ones that do music well.

The current LiveBook, though, is the first that I think really makes a custom builder competitive – and it’s the first I’ve started to covet for my own desk. It’s pricier than some mass-market machines out there, but it is competitive, and with far more of a guarantee for audio performance and reliability.

• Processors are now available up to 3.06GHz on the Centrino 2 “Montevina” – so it’s about as current as you can get architecturally
• Prices start at US$1999 – and that’s already a pretty fully-loaded machine
• The body is all-aluminum and offers a laser-etched case
• The GPU is no slouch: NVIDIA 9600M GT 512M standard, with a healthy 1680×1050 resolution on the 15.4” monitor (which I think is about perfect – any higher is hard to see, any lower cuts down on real estate)
• Lots of ports: three FireWire 400 ports (with the standard ExpressCard plugged in), one eSATA, a card reader, HDMI and VGA out, and two USB 2.0 ports
• Fast, audio-ready drives: up to 320GB 7200RPM (there’s also now a solid-state option, but I prefer conventional hard drives for their price/performance/capacity ratio)

Despite its quirks, Windows can be a wildly underrated OS for music. Of course, that has little to do with the way it works out of the box. It’s a matter of tweaking your setup so you reshape it into a finely-tuned musical tool. And I believe in sharing that info, because ultimately you should be able to make music on whichever OS you choose.

Rain Recording, a custom PC vendor that specializes in building systems for music and creative work, asked me to write up some of my favorite tools for just that job. For the first part, I looked at the unpleasant stuff — tools for troubleshooting your system and keeping it operating at maximum efficiency.

Part 2 is more fun — the goodies that actually help your musical workflow. I kept this entirely to utilities for MIDI and control, but thanks to the effort of some passionate musician-programmers, that winds up being an impressive toolkit. Quite a few items are Windows-only. (I do actually intend to cover Mac OS and Linux, too, but Windows stacked up pretty well.)

My picks, all free, donationware (and do donate and support these tools!), or relatively cheap:

Any computer – Mac, Windows, and Linux – can experience degraded audio experience pretty fast if a background task starts stealing CPU or a driver is misbehaving. In contrast, a fully-tweaked Windows machine, equipped with a set of tools to diagnose potential problems, can be rock-solid for audio performance. That’s an especially big deal for those of us using computers for live music.

I think a lot of people’s Windows experience is especially colored by bad drivers, overzealous antivirus and security software they don’t actually need, and the crapware installed by many PC vendors. I know I had that experience when I came back to Windows a few years ago, following a long hiatus. (I’m now cross-platform.) I did what many people do: installed some ridiculous, bloated security suite from Symantec. I was blown away by how fast Windows was when I just turned the darned thing off. Linux and Mac OS are happily not cursed by these beasts, but any computer music setup, regardless of platform, can benefit from tuning what’s running and making sure music software comes first.

I recently put together a list of essential Windows tools for Rain Recording, one of a handful of custom PC builders that focus on music and audio customers. The first part of the list doesn’t include any music software per se – these are just essential parts of my PC tool belt to keep things running smoothly.

All of these tools are free, so they’re well worth a download.