Old 03-11-2023, 08:40 PM   #1
e4r104
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Join Date: Nov 2022
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Default Wow! My head is spinning!

With ideas, questions, fatigue and more. Anyways, firstly, thank you to this amazing community for developing such an awesome collection of tools and then supporting one another the way that it does. Reaper is amazing and more software developers should take a page out of Cockos book this whole scene is just great.

I built a pc based live rig using things that I had in my shop as my impoverished self can't really shell out for an off the shelf solution. The button pad to the left is wired to a usb gamepad board and setup using the reaper joystick / midi function in the preferences. The line 6 pedal is something I had. There's a little lenovo tucked underneath and the Ipad pro is running duet and functioning as a touch screen for the pc. It's not permanently mounted as I use it for a number of other things. There's a TC Helicon Duet which Amazon was blowing out for $34.00 which was sort of the impetus of this project.

My primary question is what is the least taxing means of changing patches? I use Amplitube and Tonex along with some other IK stuff. I like all of them, but they're not exactly lightweight in terms of resources. It would seem that setting up a track for each sound I want would make the most sense with the solo / mute setup in Live configs or the SWS extension that has the Solo / Mute slot assignments. Is this the case? It just seems like loading or pushing fx when they are as cumbersome as Amplitube and co would be horrifically taxing to the PC.

I plan to use the button box pictured to the left to change patches and the line 6 to switch on and off stomp boxes and other parameters within each tracks fx chain. The line 6 has a "toggle" function which more or less is the same as anything else except it leaves the led illuminated. It's a sort of "dumb" switch though, so if you have it stomped, swap patches it will remain illuminated not reflecting the state of the stomp box it's mapped to in the new preset / patch / whatever. Is there an easy way to setup a visual indicator for such a state given that the stomp boxes are buried in Amplitube and I'm unaware of any sort of ability to monitor their state. I suppose I could do a snapshot or something else, but that seems cumbersome as well. Thoughts on how I can on the display (not the pedal) indicate the state of the stomps would be most welcome.

Lastly, I've seen utilities for reaper that load up images, lyric sheets, scores etc. I'd love to be able to load my crib notes for songs that I'm playing in a set when I switch to the patch for that song. I'm sure many have done this, and I've seen some different paths to doing so, but what's the most graceful integration with Live configs? I know that such a task can be mutually exclusive, but I want things to be as simple and to play as nice as possible with each other.
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Old 03-14-2023, 02:24 PM   #2
/AND/
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Hi,

I don't have much advise to give you because I primarily wanted to comment on your setup. It looks very neat and capable, good job!

I was wondering what was the method you use to use your iPad as a touchscreen for the PC?

Regarding changing patches on the fly, I would avoid any method that actually changes patches. The primary reason is stability. I've had things crashing or bugging out on me when changing patches. I'd rather opt for soloing the patch track which I intend to currently use.

The main problem is, of course, CPU power and memory. For this I recommend upgrading your laptop RAM memory. For the CPU, I don't remember if there's a 'smart disable' option in Reaper as there is in FL Studio, but search the manual. This should make all muted channels avoid processing, which will decrease CPU overhead.

Finally, why don't you try the iPad as a processing machine? Should be more capable and stable than the PC.

BTW this is why I turned to hardware (NUX Power Plug Pro and Zoom X11On) for guitar patches - stability and negligible latency.

Just my two cents.
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Old 03-17-2023, 01:14 PM   #3
e4r104
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Quote:
Originally Posted by /AND/ View Post
Hi,

I don't have much advise to give you because I primarily wanted to comment on your setup. It looks very neat and capable, good job!

I was wondering what was the method you use to use your iPad as a touchscreen for the PC?

Regarding changing patches on the fly, I would avoid any method that actually changes patches. The primary reason is stability. I've had things crashing or bugging out on me when changing patches. I'd rather opt for soloing the patch track which I intend to currently use.

The main problem is, of course, CPU power and memory. For this I recommend upgrading your laptop RAM memory. For the CPU, I don't remember if there's a 'smart disable' option in Reaper as there is in FL Studio, but search the manual. This should make all muted channels avoid processing, which will decrease CPU overhead.

Finally, why don't you try the iPad as a processing machine? Should be more capable and stable than the PC.

BTW this is why I turned to hardware (NUX Power Plug Pro and Zoom X11On) for guitar patches - stability and negligible latency.

Just my two cents.
So I use Duet as the iPad touchscreen control. It works well and can be used as the primary monitor. I have used the iPad with Amplitube as the main setup for my rig but the Ipad is a version behind the PC and they don't have the provision to combine the Tonex models with Amplitube on the ipad. Tonex is pretty incredible and coupled with Amplitube effects on either side of the amp or stomp box model, it's a very versatile system.

The iPad works quite well with Amplitude CS, but it just doesn't sound quite as good as 5.5 on the pc. Also, while I have the everything version of the iPad Amplitube, it's lacking some of the excellent amp models on Amplitube 5.5 max. I also have the full Mesa add on for the PC version which I quite like.

The last thing that moved me to the pc (this was originally going to be ipad based), was that I had a standard PC joystick PCB kicking around. With some of the midi routing JSFXs I was able to create a very flexible setup for the buttons in reaper. There's of course, no way to use the joystick board as a midi controller, and while making one from a Teensey or Arduino is not terribly difficult, I was A) impatient an B) Only had old Arduinos kicking around that would not be seen as HID devices by the ipad.

I ended up buying used on eBay, for like $10.00, a bluetooth foot switch. That does work quite well with the iPad and using it with a tiny audio interface, it's a great portable setup. I've been playing with that at the same time just to sort of a/b. I guess the (obviously) very nerdy part of my character has been getting a kick out of starting to dig in to JS to make reaper do new things.

We'll see about stability, but despite my love for the IK products, they aren't particularly stable on the iPad or Windows. Lot's of random closing when editing patches at least. So far it's been okay with Reaper, but I ended up using a single channel and using program changes on the Line 6 pedal and then pushing new presets (to a constant fx change) with live configs with the button box. So basically, each Live configs group (1-8) has 8 presets with 4 virtual channels for each. I basically make each button box button assigned to the song and limit myself to 4 foot pedals for fast changes of models or effects within each song. That said, it's still pretty fast pushing a new set of fx presets to the channel, just not instantaneous like the program changes directed to Amplitube.

A few other notes: I wish I could get all my favorite vst's for Linux, but IK and many others don't seem to care about anything other than OSX or Windows. A Linux box would be vastly preferable for this setup. Also, I use Parsec to work on things at home to tweak my settings, I'm not willing to suffer through that much touch screen editing. Lastly, I initially setup the system with 8 tracks with my fx plugins on each preloaded with the presets and midi foot switch routing. Looking at the performance meter, with the tracks muted, they were still eating 5% of my cpu bandwidth! That prompted me to start creating fx presets and pushing the presets from Live Configs and using a single track and single instance of each plug-in. I was able to dramatically reduce my samples and thus reduce latency to virtually non-existent. At 48khz and 96 samples it's approximately 5ms.

Last edited by e4r104; 03-17-2023 at 01:23 PM.
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