MOVING FROM A LAPTOP TO AN IPAD

‘Why am I carrying around terabytes of stuff I’ve done nothing with?’ Was the question buzzing around my head last September as I panned across the hard drives in my backpack. There were umpteen sound recordings, videos and pics from dozens of forays through Asia and the Himalaya, all just a head crash from oblivion. It was time to do something with them. It was also time to change my approach, from ‘post-production when I get home’ — which had clearly failed — to ‘post-production on location’. I needed to break the stockpiling habit.

I pictured myself trekking into a remote area with a lightweight high-quality rig, recording and filming an elderly villager playing endangered music, and leaving behind a finished copy. That wasn’t going to happen with my Macbook Pro. It’s an early 2013 model with 15-inch Retina display; a wonderfully reliable machine that never cost a cent in repairs, but its trekking days are over. Apart from being too heavy for what I had in mind, its battery life had faded to a measly four hours and I hated working with iMovie. I wanted a lightweight DAW with a day’s worth of battery, and a video editing app I could relate to as an audio guy.

A week later Apple released iOS 11, and reviewers asked “is it time to replace your laptop with an iPad?” Most concluded “Not