Hey I do a live gig in a house band. Currently thinking of going soft synth and using Native Insturments/powerbook combo. My Powerbook is 1.33ghz with 1.5gig of ram running DP and eventually abelton. Ill be streaming samples/audio off of a OWC Firewire 800 drive set aside specifically for samples. The live gig is pretty much Piano/organ/brass meat and potatoes kinda pad stuff ( some argpegiation etc). Is it feasable to run like this live? Is it possible to send program changes to the laptop via midi and is it quick enough to switch patches like a regular midi set up or do I have to load everything on the fly? Any thoughts or musing by people in the know would be appreciated.

I saw a band in Austin TX use a ibook and a oxygen8 controller w/ LIVE...i watched the guy load loops and such and manipulate them w/ no apparent problems..

Of course this was an experimental band.

rock

sdf

Make sure you have the latest version of Kontakt. It works very well on OS X, but older versions didn't (although they were fine on XP). And I don't know whether the latest version has fixed the OS 9 problems; it may have, but older versions worked very poorly, especially when you're streaming.

I'd be very conservative with how much you try to run when you're playing live. Kontakt lets you set a voice limit for each instrument it has loaded, and I'd recommend setting the minimum you can get away with before the cut off voices are heard.

I don't think patch changes are the way to do it. You're going to have all the sounds you need loaded up anyway, so I'd just put them on separate MIDI channels.

Also, you need to play with the settings in Kontakt to maximize its performance. The DFD settings I use are 256 voices, 192 somethings, and 384 something elses. (I forget what they are!)

And download the latest DFD extension.

By the way, I don't know how well their B3 program, if that's what you're using for organ, coexists with Kontakt. It's probably okay, but you should check the processor load.

What are you using for horns, by the way? I still haven't found anything acceptable for rock/jazz horns, only classical.

Thanks Nick Im just delving into all this so.. I have Ni Komplete 2 which has the latest vs of everything. Horns wise Im just using whats in there supplemented with a coupld hardware synths... Id like to make the switch to all soft if possible. I was going to use B4 but Ill check the load Thanks for the info!!