PC and Mac together?

[mongoose_eyeball]

After years of procrastinating, I finally bit the bullet and bought a new 27" iMac to use as the centerpiece for the home studio I always said I was about to put together (had to wait until I'd fully recovered from buying my Axe FX II rig...)

I'll probably use either Logic X, Studio One or Reason as my DAW; gonna take a brief stab at trial versions to see which one feels most natural (once my Apollo Twin Duo comes in).

Anyway, I've been looking at different plug-ins and such; been GASsing for a while for Synthology Ivory II, especially the new American Concert D Grand, which everyone raves about (though with the caveat that it's a CPU-hog).

...which finally brings me to my question: if I'm running a DAW on my mac and I want to also run a power-hog virtual instrument or plug-in (like Ivory II, or some sort of convolution reverb), I'm assuming that I could help keep latency at bay by dedicating a second computer to the non-DAW program.

My second computer, however, is a Windows 7 laptop. Can this be done under these conditions? Would I be able to link the two in some way, so that the PC laptop could do a bit of the heavy lifting?

This is something I'd have to figure out before I bought whatever software I was going to put on the PC, since you have to choose between the operating systems when you buy.

Is anybody out there already doing this?

 

[UnsungHeroGuitars]

You could indeed share some of the load, but you'll be bringing the audio out of your 'synth computer' into the main DAW one. Sync between the two isn't a problem as you're basically treating the 'synth computer' like a keyboard and triggering sounds via MIDI. Hooking up the audio via digital means no loss there either, but you'll be working with audio files on separate tracks, rather than MIDI, so any edits will mean a re-transfer of the source sounds again

Perhaps a better way would be to stick with the iMac and use Logic's 'Freeze' function whereby a software instrument gets rendered to an audio file, thus taking a massive amount of processing load off. Any subsequent edits mean un-freezing and re-rendering the track again, but that's much less faff than transferring back and forth between two computers

 

[mongoose_eyeball]

Interesting perspective, Clive, thanks. Your advice made me think of additional issues involved in the "two computer" idea. For one thing, the logistics of sending audio--digital or otherwise--from the laptop to the iMac would seem to indicate that I'd need a second interface, so I'd have one for each machine. I was thinking that the two computers might be directly connectable through a single interface, or even straight to each other, via USB.

The "Freeze" function sounds interesting. I wonder if Studio One or Reason have similar features? I know Logic is much more of an industry standard than either of the other two DAWs, but I was hoping to avoid too long a learning curve (my Axe Fx provides me with a perpetual learning curve, and one is enough), plus I live close to Baton Rouge and move in the same circles as Jim and Rick at PreSonus, so I'd have more of an inside track.

 

[UnsungHeroGuitars]

You're quite right that you would need an additional interface or two depending on what you may or may not already have - you're going to need one to get audio / mics hooked up to the iMac anyway. There's no simple way to tie the two computers to one another and have them both working 'together' as it were - but you could load a copy of the same project, say 'Song 1' on each (one computer handling synth tracks, the other guitar & vocal audio for example), sync up the SMPTE / MIDI Clocks and have them play together whilst you work / edit on each computer respectively. They'd both need to be feeding audio into one interface / mixer for monitoring and then you'll need to sort out how to capture that mixed signal for the final bounce

So, I'd still suggest that 'freezing' software synth tracks would be the better way for you to go. It's a slightly different mindset in that you'd need to get comfortable with the workflow and approach, but it's a cool way to go. I've no deep experience with Studio One or Reason in this regard personally, but I wouldn't be surprised if they have a similar feature, albeit under a different name

 

[eggzoomin]

Assuming you have a router for the pair, you could use Reaper with its Reamote feature - this allows you to run a slave machine other than your DAW and run CPU-hungry plugs on it, with the data transferred between the two via networking, no extra interfaces required. See ReaMote - CockosWiki for more information. Best of all, you can try Reaper for as long as you like, with full functionality, for nothing - REAPER | Audio Production Without Limits - and it works on Mac as well as PC . Personally I love the workflow, the low CPU overhead and the amount of power and control. The UI isn't as pretty as some of the "big" names, but there are loads of excellent third party skins available for nothing - I use one based on API hardware, but White Tie Imperial is very good as well. If you wanted to run a different DAW soft as your main program, I believe that you could run Reaper at the same time on your main box, with Reamote pulling in the slave, and then use ReWire to get the tracks into your "main" DAW soft. All with no latency.