2018 Tablet for Music Creation

I am getting discouraged with my Surface Pro 3 for managing real time music creation. It is the entry level with limited resources and I still get a lot of major glitching.

What do I have to invest in to get a good tablet with enough CPU, RAM and SSD for the job? I am hoping some of you have been down this road and can talk from experience.

MY experience is documented in my Gig Rack Guide

I looked into a Surface tablet, but concluded that they were limited on IO count and expandability. Whilst not cheap, the NUC and GeChic display combination I came up with was cheaper than high end tablets and gives me plenty of horsepower for running even demanding plugins like DIVA

Of course Brad now has the web server in Cantabile, so if I was building this again, maybe I would have used a cheaper monitor and used my iPad as touch panel.

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Wow. A Mini PC with a touch monitor is too cool. What model of NUC and display do you have in your setup?

And the web based access does open up a new world of remotely controlling a setup.

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Everything is in his doc. The NUC is an Intel Skull Canyon. Pretty cool little device.

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Hi, there is a parts list on Page 12 of the guide, which hyper links to the components I used including the NUC PCand Touch Monitor.

Sorry. Missed that link in your initial reply. Thanks for sharing that.

Very cool. Shared on Facebook/Twitter :slight_smile:

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Scanning through the forum I am finding a number of older posts regarding successfully using the Surface Pro. My SP3 was only 4G so was part of my performance limitation with all my pre-loading.

I am thinking of investing in a new Surfaced Pro 2017 with 8G/256G. I would love a higher end machine but the i7 with 16G is getting up there in price. This YouTube gives me some confidence in this decision in running with a modest level machine.

Hi Derek,

Just scanning through your gig rack guide - great resource. One question though, can the NUC handle being run with @brad 's recommended settings (i.e. no power management)? Or do you not do that?

Thanks,
John

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Thanks for the feedback, John

I’m not 100% sure what you mean by no power management, other than rif you mean unning with everything flat out and all optimisation applied for max performance? In that case, it is fine supporting that. No problems so far.

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Yes, that’s what I mean. Good to know, thanks.

I did invest in a Surface Pro 2017 with 8G/256G. I decided to get the i7 to ensure I had some CPU if required. All my previous lost issues disappeared. I can run all background procrsses and still have lots to spare.

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