Blending OS X and Windows 7 machines

[MongooseEyeball]

Hey, new home recording pals!

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.

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?

Thanks in advance for indulging a newbie rube!

 

[jonny deep]

I imagine it might be possible to send midi out of an interface on one computer to the interface of another computer then have the audio going back the other way, but I don't know if you'd get them to sync up. As far as the main DAW machine is concerned, I guess the other computer is just like a hardware synth/keyboard/reverb unit, so maybe you can get it to calculate the latency and act accordingly. Other, more experienced people might be able to help - I'm interested in seeing the answer.

Personally, I'd have opted for a high spec PC and done it all in the same box.

 

[Steenamaroo]

Johnny's probably right, but I'm thinking it'd have to be a hell of a plugin to annoy a new 27" imac.
Have you tried it all in the mac to see what happens?

PS: Your title conjured up funny images of 'Will it blend?'.

 

[TimOBrien]

I switched from an xp laptop to an iMac a couple of years ago.

Reaper (and Reason) run identically on both platforms. Makes it easier.....

 

[Mmmmqac]

Latency will never be an issue when MIDI tracks control a plug-in as the DAW knows to send the note data early by exactly the right amount to compensate. Though the latency will be there if you are performing on your virtual instrument via a MIDI controller keyboard. It's like singing through a PA with no fold-back and hearing your voice bounce off the back wall of the venue, which is quite off-putting.

I seriously doubt you will have computing power problems with such a modern machine. Convolution reverbs need to run in the same machine as their source audio tracks too. Virtual instruments can be in a separate machine (that is how I am using Kontakt in my studio because my DAW is running on a Mac G3) but it requires SPDIF and MIDI, and it prevents the use of tempo based modulations & FX.