Using Pro Tools in a Live Environment - Latency and Buffering issues

[podro]

Hello everyone, we are looking for help in using Pro Tools in a live mixing environment. We are a church that since COVID has been recording the worship team, and then remixing the music and rebroadcasting the taped version with the upgraded mix on the weekends. We purchased an intricate template built by another church that has lots of plugins including drum replacement, autotune, and a bunch of other reverbs, delays, etc. It was an immediate improvement over what we were trying to do before, as we have had minimal experience in using DAW’s, but the difference in the quality of what we produced was much higher!

Now that we are back to live services we still have a number of people watching the live livestream broadcast, and we’d like to move our live sound quality closer to post.

We would like to run our 20’ish live channels out of our Behringer X32 through Pro Tools to get the same quality of correction and eq that we had when we were mixing in post. Then we can run those tracks back out to the X32 and mix the levels to send live with video. The problem we are running into, using a newer MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM, is the latency and buffering issue. When dropping it to 128 to we can sync the audio with live video, but the computer stops recording within 5-15 minutes because of the dreaded CPU overload error. Obviously, when mixing in post, we have the buffer size set to 1024, and have not received the overload error.

A few notes before our questions:
- We did get this workflow up and running. We have 2 X32’s in use. The second board receives the channels through AES50 from the first. Then we route those channels via USB to Pro Tools, then we route the channels back to the X32 through USB.
- Yes, we do know the live mix won’t sound as good as in post.
- Yes, a great sound engineer would get us closer than going through Pro Tools, but we have volunteers running the board, and we do want to use some of the effects in Pro Tools that we don’t have on the board.
- I have perused this board and others to see what builds are out there, but really need some clarification on how to solve the latency issue.

Here are our questions:

1. What are the key computer components needed to lowering the latency and buffering while being able to record, process, and output up to 32 tracks simultaneously? Is it RAM? Cores on the processor?

2. We are looking to spend around $3000 on a machine that will be our dedicated Pro Tools rig used not just for livestreaming services, but also for mixing during the week. We have all Macs at the church, and prefer the Macs for ease of use and computers that simply “work.” (Most of the time, of course!)
- Can the newest Mac mini be fast enough to do what we want to do? (3.2Ghz 6 core i7 w/ 64GB RAM is $2300)
- Do we need to go with a PC so we can more for our money?

3. If we go PC, we are able to get a discount on Dell computers (possibly a Precision Workstation?), but are also willing to purchase through “The Pro Tools PC” (i9 rack mount) website, or build our own.
- The issue with building our own is that we don’t want to have to be troubleshooting issues and errors that typically come when tinkering with your own system. We’d like a solution that “just works,” but are willing to take steps to get there and have a solid system.

4. If building… Is there a major difference in using Windows 10 Pro vs. Home? I looked on this forum and found a couple of builds that I put into pcpartpicker. Will this get us where we need to be?
- https://pcpartpicker.com/list/D2Qjx6
- https://pcpartpicker.com/list/7Ln3Dx - Special thanks to Mandal http://duc.avid.com/member.php?u=58037

I appreciate the knowledge already shared on these boards and look forward to any advice!