anyone on a mac having positive results?

dss · Post by **dss** » Sun Jun 08, 2003 8:53 am

so this seems like a strange question, but i keep reading everyone's speculation about switching to pc laptops, and various mac related issues...

so i ask you:
is anyone using live to perform live for over an hour with a mac?
are you happy?

what are you doing? how are you getting this to work???

dss

MANMADE · Post by **MANMADE** » Sun Jun 08, 2003 9:04 am

I've been using Live on a TiBook 550 for a while and have had no issues. The range of my usage amounts to my cpu meter hovering at 30 - 60%. while the PC boys and girls may be right that their machines are handling the load better I still love my mac and would never switch sides. It does everything I want it to with no complaints. Live runs great.

dirtystudios · Post by **dirtystudios** » Sun Jun 08, 2003 7:56 pm

i just played my first gig using live last night on my ibook 800, a box-o-knobs and a guitar style midi stompbox with a foot pedal (awesome for the x-fader) and it ruled. the set was just over an hour i believe, and i had no problems whatesoever. manmade's right, macs rule, peecee's drool. (woohoo, lets start another one of these threads 'cause there aren't enough already!). seriously though, i'm way happy with my ibook and i would never give it up. i'm looking into getting another one to use alongside it. i even like it better than my old tibook (fells more solid). jaguar can suck it long and hard though, os 9 4-ever!

k

digitalia · Post by **digitalia** » Sun Jun 08, 2003 8:43 pm

Powerbook 867 15" here, use Live extensively to program some shows, tho i've only done one sets so far live that was half an hour long, worked great. was using a Mobile i/o for that gig, tho i think ultimately i'm going to be getting an RME Cardbus setup.

No probs whatsoever.

d

dss · Post by **dss** » Sun Jun 08, 2003 9:23 pm

ok,

that's promising.

please explain: how are you using your clips?

how many clips preloaded?
how many clips loaded on the fly as you go?
how many scenes?
what length are your clips?
did you ever have trouble?

as stated in the bug/support forum, i can't go more than 3-4 songs without running into serious drop out and spaztic audio issues.

dss

mic-minimal · Post by **mic-minimal** » Sun Jun 08, 2003 11:37 pm

hey dirtystudios
can you post a little more info on the stompbox xfader doodaditity that you are working with, I'd like to try that scenario out.

Rahlo · Post by **Rahlo** » Mon Jun 09, 2003 4:00 am

digitalia wrote:Powerbook 867 15" here, use Live extensively to program some shows, tho i've only done one sets so far live that was half an hour long, worked great. was using a Mobile i/o for that gig, tho i think ultimately i'm going to be getting an RME Cardbus setup.

No probs whatsoever.

d

Why are you switching from the mobile i/o to the RME cardbus deal? I ask b/c I just read a thread somewhere where a guy wrote that pcmcia is best for audio--even better than firewire. Is this true?

epiphanius · Post by **epiphanius** » Mon Jun 09, 2003 9:10 am

dirtystudios (or anyone):

jaguar can suck it long and hard though, os 9 4-ever!

I want to get an ibook 800 (my first mac); I thought that the new ones would not even run anything but OS X. I got the impression that the capacity to run older versions of the OS was disabled or something in hardware. This posed a problem for me as everyone here seems to prefer OS9 for live.

Did I get it wrong? Can you run OS 9 on new macs?

Thanks,

e.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Mon Jun 09, 2003 12:37 pm

rahlo wrote:
digitalia wrote:Powerbook 867 15" here, use Live extensively to program some shows, tho i've only done one sets so far live that was half an hour long, worked great. was using a Mobile i/o for that gig, tho i think ultimately i'm going to be getting an RME Cardbus setup.

No probs whatsoever.

d
Why are you switching from the mobile i/o to the RME cardbus deal? I ask b/c I just read a thread somewhere where a guy wrote that pcmcia is best for audio--even better than firewire. Is this true?

yes it is true, the pcmcia cardbus has faster data transfer than the 400 mBs of firewire and the "up to" 480 mBs of usb 2. Now with usb 2, though the data transfer is faster on paper, the bandwith makes it the worst choice for audio (compared to firewire or pcmcia). But with pcmcia, it is the fastest most reliable data transfer, and it is also great as it frees up your firewire port for an external hard drive. This doesn't mean firewire is bad, it all depends on your application, and your os, as macs seem to work better/faster with firewire interfaces (828 specifically i've heard of lot of pc probs, but almost all mac dudes like it). I need to be able to have 12-16 inputs at once with minimal latency (1.5 ms) and no dropouts, and the RME is the shizzle dizzle for that. ?I've also read many places from many sources that the AD/DA conversion on the RME is superior to other laptop options, and it has total mix software that is extremely flexible and powerful, allowing for 8 totally discreete and different real-time mixes at once--great for multitracking in the studio, or getting each person their perfect mix Live. Whatever works for your application, that is what you need.

ryan

Spencer · Post by **Spencer** » Mon Jun 09, 2003 5:57 pm

i use LIVE on an iBook 800 OSX with no problems. my live sets clock in at just under 54 mins.

cpu usage is a bit high but its rock solid and works like a champ.

Alex Reynolds · Post by **Alex Reynolds** » Mon Jun 09, 2003 6:11 pm

Ugh... do some research, please.

USB 1.1 specification calls for 1.5 Mbps (megabits per second) at low and 12 Mbps at high.

PCMCIA spec calls for 20 Mbps.

FireWire 1394a (so-called "Firewire 400") calls for 400 Mbps.

USB 2.0 spec calls for USB 1.1 rates and 480 Mbps.

FireWire 1394b (so-called "Firewire 800") calls for 800 Mbps.

In real-world applications, USB 2 devices will run noticably slower than FireWire 400 devices because of design considerations. FireWire is an asynchronous protocol, which means data packets do not have to travel in sequence. Additionally, FireWire carries about 20x power of USB 2, which means you can support devices without extra power cabling; those devices won't have to run slower with less power. (See TechTV and Apple Developer links.)

Often the differences in audio adapters lie in the software drivers that provide device communication. This is why the RME Hammerfall blows monkey chunks on OS X, for example. (See below.)

Sources:

-- http://www.intel.com/technology/usb/
-- http://www.codepedia.com/1/PCMCIA+BUS
-- http://www.apple.com/firewire/
-- http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/supe ... 71,00.html
-- http://developer.apple.com/firewire/overview.html
-- http://www.rme-audio.de/english/mac/osxdsp.htm

digitalia · Post by **digitalia** » Mon Jun 09, 2003 10:21 pm

Alex Reynolds wrote:Ugh... do some research, please.

Often the differences in audio adapters lie in the software drivers that provide device communication. This is why the RME Hammerfall blows monkey chunks on OS X, for example.

i hope that (somehow) means "it rocks" cause it does, trust me i used it for awhile. it was the best sounding interface i ever used and the drivers yeilded nearly indetectable latency.

the Mobile I/O claims to be bus-powered, which is a plug, but without using the AC adapter i found that it would crap out after 15 minutes of use and effectively crash Live. So the RME is still the best of the bunch for me.

d

geargasm · Post by **geargasm** » Tue Jun 10, 2003 1:00 am

Back to the question at hand...

I use a TiBook 867 w/500MB of RAM. I've loaded a few hundred (I name them, too many to count) scenes, and I've got something like 14 tracks going. No/Very Little effects however. For me, live is just a better way to record reason arrangements and play them back. At the moment, I'm not able to play things live and loop them like I could easily on my PC -- at least without all the other tracks running at the same time, or even a few tracks at that.

I use Live on both Mac and PC, and it sucks equally on both.

dirtystudios · Post by **dirtystudios** » Tue Jun 10, 2003 2:17 am

all the new ibooks boot into os 9 as well as all the 15" tibooks. the only laptops that don't boot (as far as i know) is the 12" and the 17" tibooks. i've know idea what's up with the desktops.

the foot controller i used was a yamaha mfc-10. i threw it into the setup about four hours before the set. it was a fucking great decision. it has 10 butttons and a expression pedal. i assigned the pedal to the x-fader and the buttons to the "select next scene", "select previous scene", "play selected scene" buttons and a few odd oneshot clips that couldn't be triggered by scenes. the x-fader on the foot controller was wicked. i set it up so that i have two identical drum tracks running on seperate channels and assigned to seperate x-fader channels. then i take one track and stretch it with a long transient setting to make it stutter or pitch it up or something that generally tweaks it out. this way i can use the footpedal to quickly fade between the tracks and produce lots of variations in the beat and still have both hands free. i had the x-fader assigned to a knob on my uc-16, but the foot pedal allowed much faster fades wich made the transitions smoother.

i've posted the live document below (without the samples) so you can see how i had my gig setup. i'll have a crumby mp3 up on my site soon. i setup room mics as well as a patch off the board, but i then forgot to hit record on the board mix, so i only got the room mics. it's crumby at first, but the end sounds ok.

i had multiple keys on my computer assigned to trigger samples and fx. i had a bunch of keys assigned to synth hits of different pitches and had them quantised to 16th notes so i could play them in live, but they would still be perfectly in sync ('cause who wants to actually practice?). i had lowercase letters assigned to anything i needed to access quickly and often, like samples and fx that i would quickly turn on and off to fuck up a beat real quick like. the uppercase ones i assigned to fx that needed to be turned on or off for whole songs so i could setup the next song as quick as possible. of course i didn't have enough time to actually memorize all of these so i ended up taking forever (twenty seconds or so) between songs getting everything setup for the next track. it should go a lot smoother after a bit more practice.

i had all my samples loaded when i went onstage. there were no foreign samples added to the set during the performance. i had specific loops for each song, then i improvised from there.

i didn't use any other software for the set. the only non-ableton fx's i used were a few freeware vst's. everything was done in live, absynth and or reason.

as soon as i clean up the mix i'll post it in this thread.

here's the live document, you need to alt click on it or whatever your computer does to download stuff:

http://www.dirtystudios.com/liveset

k

quandry · Post by **quandry** » Tue Jun 10, 2003 2:53 am

Alex Reynolds wrote:Ugh... do some research, please.

USB 1.1 specification calls for 1.5 Mbps (megabits per second) at low and 12 Mbps at high.

PCMCIA spec calls for 20 Mbps.....

you do some research. How is it that there are pcmcia cards with firewire ins-do these commonly used cards not utilize the full speed and bandwidth of firewire??? NOt only that, but indeed pcmcia is faster than firewire as it is basically like pci on a desktop, which is clearly a better choice than firewire in the desktop world.

On the footcontroller tip, I use the $120 Behringer fcb 1010--100 presets, 10 patch pedals, TWO freely assignable expression pedals. Takes a bit of midi understanding, but is an extremely flexible and powerful companion to Live, and you can't beat the price. Anyone playing two-handed instruments and using live can't go wrong with one of these.

Ryan