anybody used a laptop for playback on a live show?

[baschubert]

hi guys I'm planing to take my laptop and maybe an le setup to play about 16 trks of my sessions on the live stage and have the band play along,is it a safe thing to do ,my band does concerts for min 2000 people ,and I travel alot.so is it a risky thing to have a lap top on the stage,12 songs in one session,no plugins at all.and maybe a 001,or 002,and just mark the beginig of each song with a click ofcourse.pls help me.

[worldover]

Hi there.

Well I have used my powerbook on live gigs, and it runs comfortably enough. The advantage of a laptop as opposed to a desktop is ofcourse its battery, meaning if you have a power faliure you wont take long to get your compter up and running again.

If your computer handles this quite stably then you shouldnt really have any extra problems on the road. My main advice would be to always have a usable backup!, maybe a CD, minidisk etc... Something you can easily flip too in the worst case scenario. I would advise to try and run a setup where both devices are running in sync, i.e. your backup is playing at the same song point as your laptop, so you can easily flip between the two if your laptop ever goes down mid show. You can probably look into some kind of MIDI trigger, or some other form of sync, but this is always advisable.

If you have more money to burn you could always think about running a different multitrack backup, perhaps a HD multitrack machine which you could lock in MIDI sync with your PT rig?

Good luck!

Danny

[leeeden]

hey hey, just for simple stuff. eg. powerbook, 002 and a live track with click etc. works no probs. i have mates who use similar. powerbook, ibook, 002 or mbox. the best things ever invented!

[emluper]

Yeah,

I've been through some pretty complicated setups with and without the Venue, email me and we can discuss what your setup and options are.

Erik
[email protected]