Hi Jason
first of all: welcome to the community!
To address your questions, I’ll take a first stab at the hardware part of things: I’d consider NOT going for a NUC but for a different small form factor platform: I’ve built my live system around an ASRock Deskmini 310 and a Core i5 9600 (6 cores). Runs super-quietly and doesn’t seem to break a sweat on my Cantabile songs.The advantage of the ASRock is that it doesn’t run laptop CPUs but full desktop CPUs, allowing for better performance. And with a Noctua NH L9i fan, it runs quieter than all of my laptops.
The size of this little monster is neglegible - it’s about the same size as the power supply inside a “grown-up” PC.
Next, you’ll need a decent audio interface with minimum latency. Depending on your budget, I’d recommend (in decending order of cost):
- RME Babyface - probably the best low-latency performance you can get
- Zoom UAC-2 - great USB3 audio interface with very low latency
- Behringer U-Phoria UMC204HD - surprisingly good low-latency performance at an almost unbeatable price-point
All of these have MIDI interfaces on board, so you can simply connect them to your classic MIDI setup and play without fiddling with keyboard drivers.
To operate all this, I use a non-touch monitor; I rather use a wireless keyboard/trackpad combination or remote-control the mini-cube via teamviewer from my studio PC. Re touch-screen monitors, the current preference on the forum seems to be the GeChic range.
I’ll have to defer to the GeChic monitor users here on the forum to say if operating DIVA with a touchscreen is a realistic option. Might not be the best solution, given that DIVA has a number of smaller knobs and switches that might be difficult to hit with any degree of precision on a touchscreen.
Now re Cantabile, I’d recommend to work through @brad’s excellent videos, after which the guides section of the web site will help you understand the finer detail. Here’s also a post I wrote some time ago for someone taking their first baby steps in Cantabile: Live setup suggestions
And of course, we’re all here for you should you run into questions when building your own setups.
Cheers,
Torsten