Dell Mini 10v (or other netbooks) and Live Looper?

[aviavi]

Hi there,
I'm just wondering if anyone has tried running Live's Looper plugin on a Netbook, in particular on the Dell Mini 10v?

Thanks,
A

[nirmala07]

I would also be interested to find more about using Ableton with a Netbook....

?

[Tamar UK]

I have a 10v. I'll be guinea pig and see what happens over the weekend if you want but i am not holding out much expectation to be honest. It might stretch to playing a youtube vid of Live working maybe

[The Landwhale]

Are you planning on using it just as a dedicated looper? If so, I think it would work perfect for that. I'm surprised more people don't use a netbook/live setup as an alternative to the boss loopers and jam mans.

I had a Dell Mini 9 awhile back running Snow Leopard and it was able to handle Live 8 surprisingly well.
Using an Apogee Gio with a buffer of 96 samples at 44.1khz sample rate, I could run a simple Live project that had 1 track running a single instance of Guitar Rig 3 and 1 Ableton Looper. This brought Ableton's CPU meter up to around 45-50% (most of that being from Guitar Rig). Running at 64 samples was fine too, though you'd be probably get some occasional CPU spiked audio dropouts.
If you were just using the ableton looper plugin, or even a few of them, you'd get even better performance.

I originally got the Dell mini with the intention of using it solely as a guitar processor to run Guitar Rig 3 at as low a latency as possibly and sync the Dell with my MacBook pro for shows.
This worked out great, but I went back to running everything off the mbp for the simplicity of using just one comp.

I never tried the Dell with Windows, but I imagine with the right sound card you'd be able to get comparable latency and CPU performance results.
Just make sure you put 2gb of ram in it.

[rpc9943]

I use my newish asus eeepc (forgot the model #, but itd with that intel chip and 11 hour battery) with live specifically with the looper. I have a behringer bca and use fcb1010/ nanokey/novation sl zero if I want to do synth with it, and the only real downside is that the latency kind of sucks. Maybe its the bca, but I tried lowering the latency by using asio4all and I can get it down to 256 If my memory serves me well...

But it is workable and have played some pretty cool solo improv shows. If anyone knows anything I could do to bring that latency down even more, that would rock.

Ron C

[X2theL]

This is interesting. I bought an Acer Aspire One with an Atom 1.6 a year ago to use it with a Pod X3 as a live looping tool and sold it again after a month. It could handle some basic looping but once I tried a few fx it would soon run out of processor cycles. Playing with Live 7 wasn't fun at all.

I recently bought a used Thinkpad T42 for 170 Euros on Ebay and once I finally get a working pcmcia firewire card (the first one I ordered came broken) I'll try it with my Echo Audiofire 4. My first impression though is that its Pentium M 1.7 performs much better than the Atom in the Aspire. Maybe the newer Atoms have caught up but this is my experience.

[The Landwhale]

I use my newish asus eeepc (forgot the model #, but itd with that intel chip and 11 hour battery) with live specifically with the looper. I have a behringer bca and use fcb1010/ nanokey/novation sl zero if I want to do synth with it, and the only real downside is that the latency kind of sucks. Maybe its the bca, but I tried lowering the latency by using asio4all and I can get it down to 256 If my memory serves me well...

But it is workable and have played some pretty cool solo improv shows. If anyone knows anything I could do to bring that latency down even more, that would rock.

Ron C

Max ram could help (you may already have it though), other than that it's mostly up to your sound card/driver combo. I don't use Windows so I can't help much with system tweaks, but it seems you are either using too many or too demanding of plugins OR a different sound card might help get you down to 128 or lower.
128 samples should be perfectly usable.
Not sure how your fx plugins are setup in your live set, but maybe using a few sends with FX on them instead of on individual channels would reduce CPU load. (Again, you may already be setup this way, not sure)
My bet is on a different soundcard though.

This is interesting. I bought an Acer Aspire One with an Atom 1.6 a year ago to use it with a Pod X3 as a live looping tool and sold it again after a month. It could handle some basic looping but once I tried a few fx it would soon run out of processor cycles. Playing with Live 7 wasn't fun at all.

Hmmm, that's the same processor that was in my Dell Mini, and I was running Live 8 which is more demanding on CPU than 7 is. Not sure, again as above, probably down to the sound card and/or organization and type of plugins you were using.
Seems if you let the Pod do all the guitar processing and just used Looper you would be able to run really low latency with ease with the right soundcard, regardless of OS.

[kraymon]

so are the built in soundcards on these dell newer mini machines out of the question for running ableton? Just for personal tune making with headphones i mean.

[ScarKord]

I've got a Dell Mini 9 running Ableton Live 8 on Windows XP and using the built in sound card with ASIO4ALL. Doesn't have a lot of power, but it's absolutely fine for putting together some custom drum racks and programming beats on the train to work. It comfortably runs three or four concurrent loops with a drum rack and an instance of operator with maybe just the occasional glitch. The loops and drum rack are all running off of a SDHC memory card by the way, as the built in Solid State drive gets full up very quickly.

Oh, and 2GB ram is essential