Hi all, wondering what the latest precautions are for laptop failure in a live setting. My thought is to install Cantabile and all plugins on two laptops (not identical!) and keep my songs and set lists and such on a removable drive. Seems like I might get latency issues that way… I guess I could just load every single thing onto both laptops, but keeping up with edits is tough. I suppose it would have to be a process I do before any gig. Anyway, just trying to make things easy for myself. I’m willing to spend some money–but not much since my gigging is mild and quite amateur in nature.
As a note, my keyboard friends have seen me using Cantabile for the past 5 years and they have started moving to it or Mainstage. I don’t feel so alone!
I have 2 laptops set up identically with no external drive but extra ssd drives on both. I also have an RD2000 I can turn up and play through a crash to where I can change it out. I have had only a couple of crashes in 6 years of use so I’m either lucky or I picked a good product.
If you do use an external drive it doesn’t mean it will be slower. If the samples are loaded on each laptop and the vsts then the song and rack file load times shouldn’t be bad at all. If you use set list pre-load it can be fast as can be after it all loads up. Get as much memory as you can afford!!
I use two 2in1 convertibles with two audio interfaces. They run in parallel and the first switches the songs/states of the second via MIDI so that they are always in sync.
Changes in the setup have to be made on both machines (not a problem) and songs, setlists a.s.o. can be copied and inserted on the second machine.