this weekend I was part of a big Munich show called "digital analog" in the Munich concert hall "Gasteig". I was invited to run a gig with a multichannel crusherX-Mac! setup facing around 2000 very interested people.
My setup was the following :
Two crusherX-Mac! instances running on an AULab 2 In/10 Out multichannel patch on a two years old Macbook. The 10 Outs of the crushers where mixed down to 4 channel output on a Motu Traveler. That interface feeds via a analog Mackie mixer to a 4 channel surround PA around the audience. The stereo input to AULab was feeded with audio signals coming from several DJs and musicians and routed to the both crusherX-Mac! stereo inputs. I controlled the two instances by routing midi to them and feed them with keyboard and controller events coming from some Doepfer control equipment.
Sure we rocked the house and the best: No crash during that 2 days event (we played around 8 hours...) . And it was a good experience to see what has to be changed (in my opinion) to make the handling of crusherX-Mac! even better for live performance. Most of the issues were addressed from the field before and I would like to discuss the tops with you before implementing them in next update:
- We definitive need a way to set the generators speeds to a chromatic scale. I already started a keyboard implementation that can control the "pitch" of each generator in a "synthesizer way".
Gating and Velocity of Keyboard events should be mapped to Quantization and Volume settings of the generators.
The range buttons of Vapor modulations should be more useful (currently they only divide range by factor 1/10/100 but each settings should have its own scaling regarding to better matching interesting adjustment areas.
Removing MIDI assignments from undo chain
Add DCO volume fader to the mixer. The simple Random DCO button is great to send additional crazy "notes" to the mix in case the live input is too boring...
Replace the mixer routing buttons to simple link buttons. In crusherX-Live! they make sense, in crusherX-Mac! and crusherX-Studio! not.
Output volume fader should also affect additional generator outputs. My left hand was bounded to the mixer faders to control the volume. That was a bit painful and it should be possible to control the overall surround volume by the interface too.
Add automatically CPU load limiting on smaller birth times. Sooner or later there comes a situation where the grain birth explodes (mostly on short birth times and long lengths). That leads to CPU overload. There must be a logic to detect that and decrease automatically the birth rate. This logic has been implemented in crusherX-Live! but not yet in crusherX-Mac! and crusherX-Studio!. I have to update this.
best
Jörg