Hi all,
I have a Gateway p4 laptop that I bought a
little over a year ago for some work.
It has spent it’s last 6 months as a
glorified jukebox playing iTunes. The gear junkie just bought an iPod, though, so now the laptop sits at home.
I’d like to tryout using Ableton
Live on it and seeing if I could put together some sort of portable rig.
Does anyone have any experience with the
Echo Indigo I/O? It seems like the PC
card soundcard option is the least troublesome of all of the formats. I do have a firewire
port, but I’m worried about latency, self powering the firewire unit, dropouts, adding another firewire
device, etc. USB seems troublesome
and hi-latency. I’m also
going to use the two ports I have for mouse and midi i/o.
My big question is how
you might pre-listen in Live with the Echo I/O’s ‘console’
feature. It says that your software
will see 8 outs, but those are 8 ‘virtual’ outs which are remixed
at the console, then spit out the 1/8” plug. If you wanted to prelisten
on headphones, but not have that prelisten signal in
your main mix…can it be accomplished?
Also off-topic. In a desire to keep
the rig simple and fun, I would like to not have a big firewire
Hard Drive tacked onto the laptop.
It’s not going to do any serious ‘gigging’
in the near future. So that led me
to think that an internal 7200 rpm hard drive in the laptop would suffice. Does anybody have any experience with
using a 7200rpm drive in a laptop for audio
work? I know they always recommend separate
drives for apps and audio, and this is the way my desktop system is setup. But would a good speed drive suffice for
the laptop? Maybe partition it
into two volumes?
Sorry for the off topic. If you have any resources where I could
go, feel free to point me in the general direction.
Thanks in advance,
Rich
