it’s 2 years I’m using Cantabile as keyboardist and I feel very good with this gear.
since my rig is quite complicate, with back tracks, click and band cues, tons of instruments at the same time, video controlling and so on, I started thinking to duplicate PC and audio card to save the butt in case of crash.
to be honest in more than 100 among rehearsals and gigs in the last 2 years I only had one crash. and this was due to the Motu 828x which lost the connection. it was a bug of the driver.
Now I have 2 Motu 828es (great cards!) which sound better and have a more professional driver (avb driver) which normally never crashes.
anyway, I would li,e to improve my gear wih a redoundancy system. I already have 2 twins PC (identical Dell M3800 i7 16gb 1tb ssd) and 2 Motu 828es thunderbolt audio cards.
futhermore, I bought a Radial SW8 auto switcher card for redoundancy purpose.
this card has 8 inputs A and 8 inputs B aand has 8 outputs.
I can connect both my audio cards to the SW8 and select manually which card has to play OR I can use the system automatically.
to operate automatically I need to send a drone signal (flat single frequency ontinuous signal, i.e. 1000hz) from the A card to let the SW8 know that card is still working. when the drone signal is lost the SW8 switches to the B inputs with zero latency, and I can continue playing.
I need to send all the midi signals (from the keyboards and the controllers) to both the PC, but this is easy.
now, how can I send the drone signal from Cantabile even when the sequencer is stopped in order to prevent any false switch on the SW8?
it’s seems to be intersting!
must check if it runs with the same audio card used by Cantabile (motu 828es) by sharing the driver (I suppose the driver is a multiclient driver) and it let me select which ouput (i.e out 8) to use.
I’ll try.
thanks for the suggestion!
The background rack is independent of the song - so if you put a plugin like tone generator (above) into your background rack, it should keep on generating sound as long as Cantabile is running. Give it a test…
BTW: for everyone else looking for a similar solution: there is also a cheaper way to do this: the iConnectivity PlayAUDIO12 is an audio interface with 10 individual outputs that connects to TWO PCs/laptops in parallel and switches seamlessly from one to the other in case of failure. Costs around $500, so about a third of the Radial switch box.
Of course, the interface then becomes the single point of failure…
Unfortunately, it has no audio input, so doesn’t work for my scenario, since I need an audio in for my guitar… But it may be just the ticket for live keyboarders like @Neil_Durant who need seemless fail-over…
mmmhhhh…
I really need inputs. I use vocoder (with my mike) and some other little device sometime (like a theremin, etc.).
also, I already own 2 828es and the SW8. let’s use them!!