Performing with Ableton

[MuttThud]

I have heard this sentiment elsewhere. I'm really hoping that the Mac Mini with 4 USBC ports and the Ethernet will do what I need it to if I decide to go that route.

Bass player and Ableton Live user here. Don’t run it live but use it for all my writing and recording. Latest version (10.1) is v reliable IME, I run it for hours a day without any crashes or lockups. Judging from the posts on the Ableton forums, the people who have trouble with it tend to be running older machines with previous gen two cores and relatively low RAM. It is not a super power-hungry piece of software but it's definitely better to max out the specs if you can. I reckon the new Mac Mini with mid to high end spec plus Thunderbolt 3 will be more than enough. BTW I use a UAD Arrow Thunderbolt 3 interface, which I'm very happy with. Would have no issues taking it on stage if I played out live. Dante looks interesting but the whole audio over Ethernet thing seems fairly new and oriented to large project studios not live performance (as far as I can see anyway) so don’t know if this would be a useful road to go down at this point. Worth exploring though.

 

[Frank Tuesday]

I stole this guy's setup for playing around at home.
Instead of using it like a looper pedal where you're just stacking loops, you record a loop, then you record it into an open cell. The great thing is that you can recall previous loops at will.

This is another one I played with, but like the first better.

 

[eJake]

I stole this guy's setup for playing around at home.
Instead of using it like a looper pedal where you're just stacking loops, you record a loop, then you record it into an open cell. The great thing is that you can recall previous loops at will.

This is another one I played with, but like the first better.

Thanks for the reply but I've def seen both of those before.

I use the IAC driver on my Mac to program the tracks to arm and record in/out so I can just pick up the instrument, play my loop in, put the instrument down, pick up another and keep building my track. I'll post a vid of what I do here when I finally record one I like.

 

[Frank Tuesday]

holy crap anyone have any experience with this?! Ethernet wired systems (like the 2018 mac mini) can output without an interface! crazy talk...

You still have to have an "interface". There has to be some mechanism to convert the digital to analog. I think the use case you're considering is that the FOH mixer becomes the interface, which is great as long as every place you play has a DANTE equipped FOH mixer.

 

[eJake]

You still have to have an "interface". There has to be some mechanism to convert the digital to analog. I think the use case you're considering is that the FOH mixer becomes the interface, which is great as long as every place you play has a DANTE equipped FOH mixer.

Ya I ended up talking to my buddy who is a pro engineer. He said that until the platform is universal I will need an interface. I been looking at the playaudio12. It uses Ethernet and traditional IO

 

[Frank Tuesday]

Ya I ended up talking to my buddy who is a pro engineer. He said that until the platform is universal I will need an interface. I been looking at the playaudio12. It uses Ethernet and traditional IO

Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't you need another interface to get sounds into the computer?

 

[eJake]

No, you are correct. I am only talking about Output.

 

[seamonkey]

Ya I ended up talking to my buddy who is a pro engineer. He said that until the platform is universal I will need an interface. I been looking at the playaudio12. It uses Ethernet and traditional IO

Playaudio12 is a great "O" only interface.
Perfect for Ableton. It's got the failover feature for when something rare happens and you need to instantly and live failover to the other PC
The ethernet is MIDI only. Midi is still very much part of any live set up.

I owned a iConnectAUDIO4+ and love it. I do wish it had more outputs at time. Using ASIO4ALL I can combine multiple audio interfaces to look like one big one.

So I was spying the Playaudio12 to fill up the second half of rack space.