Using an Asus Eee, XP and Live for gigs

reptar · Post by **reptar** » Wed Feb 06, 2008 4:01 am

Hi everyone, at the moment my band is using Live 6 on a Macbook to do the beats for our live show, I've been looking at an Eee as a possible replacement cause it's smaller, lighter, cheaper to replace if it gets broken and wouldn't be my main computer, so less stress at live shows.

Has anyone got any thoughts on if this could handle running Live? It'd probably just be playback of up to 5 stereo tracks at a time, with an MPD to trigger stuff. I guess I'd need to get a USB audio card too.

What do people think?

reptar · Post by **reptar** » Wed Feb 06, 2008 10:11 pm

Nobody has any thoughts on this?

husker · Post by **husker** » Wed Feb 06, 2008 10:24 pm

If you are just playing back 5 tracks with no effects then should be fine...

substance_g · Post by **substance_g** » Wed Feb 06, 2008 11:28 pm

What Husker said.

No effects is the key. If you start adding effects or plugins you're quickly going to run into problems. The processor on the Eee is pretty rubbish by today's standards. It's nowhere near close to a replacement for a Macbook.

I like 'em though - cute little things with more geek-cool than any Mac products. For email, web, they're great.

Clearscreen · Post by **Clearscreen** » Wed Feb 06, 2008 11:49 pm

how many USB ports do these things have? does it have enough to run a mouse, a soundcard and the external USB drive you might need? the 8Gb HDD is the largest it comes with and i'm not sure that'll leave too much room once you install XP on it... otherwise it looks kinda cool, but i dunno how many tracks/plugins you'd get out of it...

if it was touch screen i'd snap one up and turn it into a dedicated monome/lemur style midi sequencer!

reptar · Post by **reptar** » Thu Feb 07, 2008 4:17 am

It's got 3 usb ports and a flash card slot. I was thinking I'd put an 8GB flash card in it and use that as my data drive, then use one usb port for a soundcard and one for the mpd. I'd prefer to use a solid state drive and keep it internal but if it wasn't fast enough I'd go for a bus powered usb drive.

I was thinking of stripping XP right down and maybe even seeing if there was a way I could get it to open Live in full-screen mode as soon as it booted up. Should be pretty easy if I remember right from my old PC owning days. I'd just dump finished sessions onto it that I'd done on the mac so no need for any plugins, just audio and midi clock out.

I read somewhere that the processor is going to be upgraded to a Merom in April, I think I'll wait til then. The Presonus Audiobox should be out by then, I think I'll get one of those cause I'm pretty pleased with the build quality of my Firebox.

Anyone else got any thoughts?

oune · Post by **oune** » Fri Feb 08, 2008 9:37 am

Screen definition is very minimal, so it may cause some problems

chis · Post by **chis** » Fri Feb 08, 2008 11:54 am

Playback should be no problem. I'd have thought the on-board flash would be fast enough to get away with more than 5 tracks.

But current EeePCs use Celeron M CPUs, so you're unlikely to be able to use many effects at all.

Biggest problem is screen res at a paltry 800x480 (or thereabouts), unless you don't mind lugging around another LCD.

Eee's would probably be excellent as a "cheap hardware sequencer" though, if you use something like Seq24.

philipc · Post by **philipc** » Wed Mar 12, 2008 8:36 pm

Some interesting info here including screenshots.

http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=9122

Adding a touchscreen could make it interesting for Live and live generally.

epiphanius · Post by **epiphanius** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 2:37 am

http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=9122

Thanks for that link, and the other observations.

I have decided that the Macbook Pro is beyond my price range, and that the Macbook plain has a horribly reflective screen, making the eee an appealing alternative way to play out.