Greetings,


I've been playing keys for a long time, but never live until now, and rather than using my MIDI controller with a sound module, I would like to use it with soundfont players and softsynths (mainly the SFZ) with a laptop for live use, but being new to this, I don't know exactly what I need. I have a netbook, but it's not powerful enough. I don't want to do anything fancy with it...just want to use it like a sound module. I know how to use the SFZ player now (both standalone and within Sonar X1, but I'd like to use it both ways depending on what I'm doing), so I don't think I'll need a lot of help there, but I need a simple rundown of everything I'll need to use it in a live setting, including: 


- Laptop specs ideal for using it with no latency


- Any other software/hardware I'd need


- Should the line be going directly out of the laptop's headphone jack or out of an interface, and what kind of interface would be ideal? 


I'm such a noob, I don't even know what ASIO means. But I'm not looking to do anything complicated like I said, so I just need a little help to simplify things. Thanks!


- Freeze

I use sfz.exe as a stand-alone sample/synth on an atom-powered notebook. I have FM7 and several other stand-alon VST synths on the same notebook.

I have a korg 3-octave mini-key master keyboard (5-octave coming soon) and it connects directly over the USB port. Uses standard windows drivers (XP 32 in this case) so no problems there.

You can use the headphone jack if you like as long as the one on your laptop does not have a digital buzz or high-pitched whine.

You may also run into hum loop problems. If none of these apply in your case, just go. 

A good interface should help with latency.  RME is a good low latency choice, but is rather expensive.  Other, cheaper interfaces will have to be tried out to see if you can "play" live w/ them.  Using your internal card (the headphone output) will probably suffer from lag - but as above you'll want to check for yourself.

If you are playing the sfz live, any old DAW will do - or even the player in stand alone mode if it will do that.  Otherwise, SONAR is a good candidate as a DAW wrapper, tho most people use LIVE for live stuff (tho that is more of a DJ kind of tool).

ASIO is a type of driver that many interfaces can use to "talk" to the computer(along w/ WDM, the old microsoft driver).  The interface makers write the software using the ASIO specs so it will communicate w/ the computer w/o a lot of the problems if each interface had its own standard.

There should be no problem using a laptop as a software player, as long as you don't load it up w/ a lot fo other things - playing back a lot of audio tracks, playing several synths at once and dumping a bunch of effects on your audio.  That is what eats up CPU, not  the SFZ player.  For that, all you have to worry about is the latency.

@

Hi Freeze,

you don't have to break the bank to play live with softsynths.
Of course, you need a good laptop, you can't get around that!! Any modern laptop should be up for the job.

The internal soundcards are not good enough. The sound is often bad with lots of static noises, and the latency is unusable. So you need an ASIO Sound Card . I've been using the Behringer UCA222 for years now, and it sounds amazing. The card only costs about €25 and has a very low latency driver. (I have a latency of 8ms) Just what you need...

When playing live, you also need a DI (Direct Inject) box to connect the soundcard to the mixer. I use the Ultra-DI 'DI20' (also from Behringer) costing only €20.

You already have a controler, SonarX1 and some softsynths, so basically the soundcard and DI (and some cables...) are all you need to get you started...

Of course, if money is no option, you can opt for a more expensive soundcard with more options, but the Behringer does a great job anyway at 16bit 48Khz.

Cheers.