Traktor S4 - Most Stable laptop/tablet solution for heavy use with 4 decks?

NeilDil
NeilDil Member Posts: 18 Member

Hey peeps!

I've had an S4 MK1 for 10 years and so far, running it on a Macbook, it's never crashed or failed in practice or at a gig. (Macbook Pro, 15" 2.3ghz i7 16GB DDR3 on high sierra)

However, I'm looking at buying another laptop or tablet to run traktor S4.

The Macbook is big, expensive, needs to be plugged in whilst in use and if it fails, I have no spare system to run Traktor with.


I would love to try out a Windows OS with Traktor, since I could use the laptop/tablet for other things. But the following things concern me about Windows...

Windows running 4 decks on Traktor:

  • I've seen it crash during other people's sets (not responding, forcing to shut down)
  • I've heard audio cut out for split seconds of silence during sets, but not crash entirely
  • People say you can mess about with the settings in Windows to prevent background tasks from causing traktor to crash, but I've tried that and I had no end of hassle trying to stop it from crashing. I'm savy, but not a programmer or computer geek.

Mac OS running 4 decks on Traktor:

  • Limited to Mac OS compatible software only (its only advantage is to run Traktor stable)
  • They cost a fortune
  • At any point, a mac can fail beyond repair and then you're forced to by a new one (this happened with my last mac, which cost £2600 new, 3 months out of warranty for replacement & was deemed unrepairable.)
  • It runs Traktor S4 with 4 decks, you can get as technical as you like and it never crashes.
  • My previous Macbook could handle about 9 hours on the battery alone - but the graphics card failed and it never worked again.

It'd be great to hear some suggestions in order to help make my setup more compact. But in the past, I've had to send back equipment after testing it at home to realise some Windows laptops just couldn't perform well enough to run 4 decks simulataniously for long periods of time.

So if you know of systems, Mac or Windows, which can run 4 decks with no hiccups, I'd like to hear your thoughts. Ideally something no bigger than 13" would be great, or 14" tablet, I could imagine it'd need a decent processor i5 minimum and hopefully, long battery life for on the go.

I've seen Lenovo Yogas and Surface Pros & wondered how well they perform, but if anyone's already been through this research and can point me in the right direction I'd be very appreciative :-)


Thanks!


Neil

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