twisted-space wrote:Thats fantastic.......
Now opinions on the babyface please.
And the story goes sad from here
But eventually happy
And I did find out a few fun things
SO all that ended up doing was taking longer for the system to crash. After about 10 minutes of jamming with the computer generated lead guitar it would just go kaput
and I'd have to power cycle everything for it to recover
Being on the verge of taking a sledge hammer to the laptop in frustration (literally not figuratively) I decided to just walk away and buy a new laptop.. Which I did today (would have done it last week but I was in Austin over the weekend)
I purchased a Lenovo Edge 14 for about $599 US.
And it now works great.
I can run everything at 96 samples without any glitches..
WELL almost
The instrument runs super. I bang on every key and go nuts and I never hear it click or pop YAY.
I went into some of my sample projects I have and I shed about 6 tears when one of my samples kept popping at the very beginning. I have this sample transposed and whenever I would transpose it more it would pop worse unless I changed the samples to 2048
What I finally figured out though is that it only does this if
-warping is set to complex pro
-and you have a a shortened loop region on the sample
If I changed to complex it transposed like a PRO.
Or if you crop the sample it works fine. I right click cropped the sample and now I can run it with complex pro and transpose the shit out of it at 96 samples without any glitches...
Not sure if that's a limitation of the laptop
a limitation of ableton
a bug with ableton
or just how life goes
but whatever
I never use loop regions I crop everything (usually) I guess I was too lazy that night to right click than left click
All seems good now... Have about 8 hours of practice sessions before the next show so fingers crossed..
As far as the Babyface I'm probably WAY WAY WAY too much of a novice user to give a very good review but I can try
I'm only using 2 outs, one in, and the head phone jack..
I can run at 96 samples which is probably reason enough to get it....it has a like 2 ms latency. Being able to press a note on the keyboard and hear it come out the speaker at the same time seems like a rare treat with Audio Interfaces
I like the construction a lot ... I really like how small it is..
I like the large rotating thing for volume control.
I like the lights so you can see levels.
I like that the lights turn red when you start pushing it into the awesome levels so everyone knows you're really giving it to them
I like that you can push the rotating thing down and it dims the outs in an oh shit I think I'm about to break the speakers fashion.
The Total FX program it comes with is really cool. I can tell that I understand about 5 percent of it.
The onboard effects are nice... I haven't used them too much yet because I can loop the ins through ableton just fine and use some presets I've already built
Overall I just like it because it feels like a solid construction from both a software and hardware perspective. I don't see the USB drivers crapping out on me randomly like I see with most Audio Interfaces. Plus I really like how mobile it is my entire setup takes up about 16 inches by 24 inches.. With a laptop (now a smaller one), an mpk25, and the babyface. I really needed everything to be reliable and working for a show this weekend so I've only pushed what I need. I'll learn it much more through and through in March but for now I Just need to know it's not going to all of a sudden emit a loud static noise of death which it hasn't so far.
And that's all I got really for a review :-/
Like I said I'm a pretty hardcore novice user at this point. Hope something in there was useful.
If something freaks out and dies on me at some point I'll come back and note that
And thanks again for all your help with things..
Even though the Dell can't run Ableton it's never ran faster so at least it has that going for it..
oh and on a side note the only downside so far that I can see with the Lenovo Edge that I purchased is that it only has 2 USB Bus controllers
I don't know if that matters too too much but the integrated webcam runs on one and the like security finger scanning thing runs on the other.
It has 3 USB plugs the 2 on the side are on the same controller and the one on the back is on its own..
So for now I've disabled the webcam and the finger thing so that the keyboard and the babyface are each the only thing running on their respective controllers.
That's the only thing about the construction of my laptop that makes me sad. I was hoping to run a webcam possibly during gigs but I'd be a wee bit terrified that might screw up the through put for some reason on the controller and cause something to go out.