by dhbp-nord » 02 Jul 2015, 15:23
I am a Windows guy but quite fluent in Mac and Linux (IT manager by day) - having started in music/midi in DOS then Windows, I've stayed there ever since. Once I got into VSTs I found there were some plugins that were not released for Mac so I've just stayed there. That being said, my keyboard rig includes a Mac Mini running Windows 7 with Reaper, to host all my VSTs. Rock solid so far. Since I'm an IT guy I am comfortable with backing up the entire Windows (Bootcamp) partition to a USB3 drive, so I can easily restore to another Mini if needed. *EDIT* - using Winclone, works great
If the Mini were to go down during a gig, while it would be inconvenient, my NP2 has enough on-board sonic power to get me through the night. So far though no issues whatsoever. Takes a little time between songs but I'm ok with that as long as I plan ahead. I really like having the sonic palette of all those plugins handy for live performance so for me it's worth the trouble.
I picked up a second hand Mini quad i5, added 16gb ram and will be upgrading to a 1TB SSD soon (this mini will actually take 2 HDs). I liked the form-factor of the Minis - plus it has Firewire for my M-Audio sound cards. I considered running OSX native but as mentioned above there were enough of the cool freebie VSTs that are Windows only. I read some worrisome reviews of Mainstage being unstable as well so that kind of dissuaded me.
DH
Last edited by
dhbp-nord on 02 Jul 2015, 16:37, edited 1 time in total.
-Nord Stage 3 88
-Novation SL MKII 61
-Rise 2
-Alesis Q88
-Roland AX-09
-Focusrite 18i20
-ASUS ROG laptop, 32gb, 6 TB SSDs, Win11, Ableton 11, Reaper
-Omnisphere 2, Keyscape, Trilian
-Arturia, Komplete, IK suites
-Behringer X18
-StagePas 400i
-EV ZLX-15BT