NI Komplete5 or Roland Fantom-XR for main synth(s)?

douglas_carmichael · NI Komplete5 or Roland Fantom-XR for main synth(s)?

I'm putting together a rig to be used for both an SL 'funky'/electronica livePA and also for studio production.

My question is whether I should go with Native Instruments Komplete5 (and possibly KORE2) for the "main" synth portion of my setup, or would a Roland Fantom-XR module be a better choice because it doesn't use my main CPU?

I'll be controlling the whole thing from an Elektron Machinedrum-UW Mk2 and a Roland MV-8000 sampling drum machine, and mixing through a Yamaha 01V96 mixer. (The analog sounds and voice modulation will come from a Roland JP-8080.)

Would a 2 x 3.0GHz dual-core Xeon / 8GB RAM MacPro be enough to run SL + streaming + softsynths on, or should I use another machine to run Nicecast?

Thoughts?

Jambalaya

The first answer to your synth question is "whichever sounds best to you." Wink

However, I can tell you that running soft synths is one of the more processor-intensive tasks you can do. Streaming isn't going to be the big problem - running a soft synth in real time AND running SL is a lot to ask of a computer.

I have to say that I'm not running Mac - but even so, in general it sounds like you're expecting a lot of any machine. If you have only the MacBook, I'd suggest going with the hardware synth for SL performances.

douglas_carmichael

Actually, I currently own (and work in SL on) a 2.4GHz Core2Duo MacBook Pro w/4GB RAM and a 160GB 7200rpm disk. (When I'm in SL, the fans spin up like a banshee, though.)

The MacPro is going to be the main core of my studio. Do you think that a system of that caliber (2x3.0GHz dual-core Xeon/8GB RAM) could work for live SL performances, or should I just either go with a hardware synth or run SL on the MBP and the synth stuff on the MP?

Jambalaya

Well, if you have two then I'd definitely split the duties up between the two. No sense maxxing out your headroom if you can avoid it.

Even with a dual core machine (2.0 GHz Athlon), I see SL hitting 100% spikes on at least one of them all the time. Surprised