Vintage Synth Explorer Forums

Hello everyone, I'm new here, because I was curious about your opinion and expierience with VST and computer based setups, i made an account

so, here goes :

I was wondering if I'd play with a setup consisting of a good laptop (macbook) and a controller or two, olangside with my MS2000 (save the comment - I like the thing) and a Roland RD700. In this way I could easily trigger samples and stuff with my laptop, but I=isn't latenxy a problem if I - for instance - want to play a big program like Absynth live.

Maybe this is a really stupid question, but if so, i'd still like to know why.
Could anyone give me advice?

Thanks in advance!

Latency is solved with an audio interface, but the Core Audio drivers have a pretty low latency already. However, you can't plug other instruments or microphones in a MacBook, and it obviously does not have a preamp.

You could use the audio interface as a mixer of sorts at the same time, so you could route your hardware in there, record, and send it as a stereo mix to the PA or your monitor speakers.

Yeah, ofcourse, out of obviousness I forgot to mention the audio interface. =)

But does a good interface stop the latency problem? And which interface should I use then?

I was thinking about a firewire-interface with a midi port on it I hate USB controllers)

Most audio interfaces offer one MIDI in and one MIDI out port purely as a courtesy (TASCAM's firewire controller has 4 MIDI I/O if I recall correctly, but it's exception, not rule).

To hook up both to the audio interface, you'll have to daisy chain. If you plan on hooking up 2 non-USB controllers (unless I misread that), get a separate 4-port MIDI interface. It is not worth the hassle to daisy-chain everything and it's actually worse because each step in the chain adds its own lag.

Latency is caused by the fact that any audio sent out by the application has to travel through several layers of software. ASIO drivers (and Core Audio) are aware that applications need access that is as direct as possible to the hardware, and bypass the layers. This reduces the time-to-travel to a small number - for instance, 4 or 6 ms.

On-board soundcards do not have these drivers. For PCs, there's ASIO4All, but it's a stopgap and again, does not add anything in the way of functional hardware.

And which interface should I use then?

This depends entirely on your available budget and your need for inputs/outputs. If you need 4 inputs, 2 for the RD, 2 for the MS2K, and say, 4 outputs (one for your personal set of monitors, one for the PA), then you should pick what matches this.

any decent audio interface should be able to get low enough latency for playing softsynths with no noticeable lag. The reason latency is sometimes considered to be a problem with cheaper interfaces is that latency is doubled when using a computer for effects processing and such (as it adds the latency going in and again going out) but even then you can usually get it to an imperceptible level with any audio interface worth owning.

Your better off with firewire for an audio interface than usb IMO, at least if you're doing more than one channel at a time.


But yeah, it's not difficult to play softsynths live on a macbook.

MitchK1989 wrote: But yeah, it's not difficult to play softsynths live on a macbook.

in general, yes.
but there are certainly exceptions.
NI's massive, for instance.
as much as I love the softsynth, it's a massive CPU-eater.
I've got fairly new macbook pro with 2,6 GHz processor, but with a lot of its sounds, you can see the CPU meter go up to 35% or more and you get hickups, no matter how you try to re-adjust your audio settings.
of course it also depends on which sounds I play, and how many notes (I guess my piano-history doens't help in this case), and I'm sure it'll get a lot better if I add another 2gig of RAM, but Massive will still stay a huge CPU-eater, that much is plain obvious.

Absynth or FM8 are tons better.
in fact, with most softsynths, it's not a problem at all,
I'm just trying to say : some exceptions are still hard on your CPU, even if you have a new machine.
so if you wanna use these live, be extra careful,
that's all