Anybody using a dedicated laptop live?

[mongoose_eyeball]

I've been thinking lately about getting a cheap used/refurbished laptop that I could keep in my rack. It wouldn't cost much, and I'd have all of the advantages of Axe-Edit in a live setting. It's embarrassing to admit, but I can no longer read the Axe-FX II screen (except for the patch number) without reading glasses, so tweaking eq, gain, etc. on the fly is impossible for me.

I've also got my MFC set up for one-patch-per-bank, so I can use six of the buttons for scenes, and the rest for individual effects. I use 12 or 13 patches, maybe five of which are generic, do-all or genre-specific, and the rest are built for specific songs. The "specific songs" list is inevitably only going to get longer, as bands I play with add songs that call for some oddball-something the "workhorse" patches don't cover, and I don't like the idea of scrolling through patches one at a time between songs while the band waits for me.

On a side note, I've also been messing around, building a solo ambient-guitar set for local coffeehouse gigs, and it would be nice to incorporate, say, Ableton Live into the mix as I've seen some ambient looper guys do on YouTube.

So who here is using a laptop with their Fractal in a live setting? How's it worked out for you?

 

[deathbyguitar]

Sounds like a no-brainer to me. I was using my Axe-FX as an audio/MIDI interface for my Roland drumset and Superior drummer and boy was that handy to have at the gig! You can find old ThinkPad T-Series machines for next to nothing used and they're super tough. My T430 certainly does the job well enough.

 

[TheDought]

I've tested it a couple times and the issue I run into is the midi timeouts that happen. Once you use the MFC, Axe Edit times out and you have to wait for it to reload before you can make any changes with it. I would try to make any changes between songs and there just isn't enough time to wait for it to reconnect.

With that said I may be doing something wrong so hopefully someone with more knowledge can shed some light for the both of us.