Sequencing on a mac, hosting plugins on a PC?

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I've fallen in love with Logic, and I'm considering switching to a Mac setup.
I have a beastly powerful PC workstation, and downgrading to a Mac with less than half the power, for twice the price, is daunting to me. I'd hate to lose the processing power and memory of the PC, and it'd be lovely if I can start out on a low-end Macbook or old Mac Pro instead of jumping all in and getting one of their all new trash bins.

So... I've heard that some composers will have one computer with a sequencer, but load their instruments externally, hosted by another computer.
Is this possible between a mac running logic, and a PC as host for the plugins? How does it work? Why do people usually do it? Is it, like me, to utilize the cheaper processing power of PC's, or is it usually done between Mac + Mac and PC + PC?

My setup is almost entirely based on NI Kontakt, if that makes a difference.

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On possible solution that's quite popular is Vienna Ensemble Pro:

http://www.viennaensemblepro.com

Takes a little bit of setting up and it's a kind of paradigm shift (client/server plugins ...) but it works well, and has been around a long time so stability generally isn't a problem.

Peace,
Andy.
... space is the place ...

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David Larsen wrote:Why do people usually do it?
Because it dedicates your resources directly to the tasks of the plugins, in a process other than the sequencing host's process. Not competing for priority within that.
VE Pro is cross-platform, it could be either/or. It also works as 'local host' server, doing the same trick of freeing the instruments and FX from the sequencing host. I've done both.

Back when Gigastudio was pretty much it, people used 'server farms', ie., Giga, or most typically an instance of Giga, had a machine dedicated to it and MIDI was ported to it some way and the resulting audio was ported back via a soundcard on each machine, typical was lightpipe back to the sequencing machine. VE Pro got rid of the soundcard and cabling in favor of a CAT6 cable over LAN back around 2010. It's a whole mixer with automation mapping for every plugin that exposes the parameters and will serve to bridge your 32-bit things if you're running a x64 host or vice versa, it runs both at the same time.
And, you can assign cores per an instance of it, meaning the things which eat more CPU can be isolated and assigned more.

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Use Logic with 'Core Audio' disabled. This turns it into a snappy MIDI only sequencer. Ensure you have a way of getting real MIDI out from your Mac.

On the Windows computer, use a modular VST/VSTi host which has a real MIDI-in device. Ensure its MIDI in is coming in from the Mac's output.

Essentially you're using the Windows machine like a virtual hardware rack instrument and the Mac as a MIDI sequencer.

Good luck!

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Thanks guys, great responses! I'm wondering, generally, how does the midi and audio routing work with these kinds of tools, can I send the midi to my PC and recieve the audio back into Logic's mixer?
I'm used to using many midi sends and Kontakt in multi-out mode, can I do something similar using a bridge host?
Vienna seems to have a mixer built in, so I'm wondering if it can send the audio back to logic after/before the mixer, or if I'm going to edit midi in Logic and the mix everything in the built in mixer

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David Larsen wrote:Thanks guys, great responses! I'm wondering, generally, how does the midi and audio routing work with these kinds of tools, can I send the midi to my PC and recieve the audio back into Logic's mixer?
Yes, the audio can be routed directly in to Logic for mixing.

Audio and MIDI is all handled over the network (cabled LAN works best for this, as it's lower latency than wireless).
... space is the place ...

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David Larsen wrote:- how does the midi and audio routing work with these kinds of tools, can I send the midi to my PC and recieve the audio back into Logic's mixer?
I'm used to using many midi sends and Kontakt in multi-out mode, can I do something similar using a bridge host?
Vienna seems to have a mixer built in, so I'm wondering if it can send the audio back to logic after/before the mixer, or if I'm going to edit midi in Logic and the mix everything in the built in mixer
You can mix where you prefer to mix. Since they introduced the full automation mapping in VE Pro 5, I don't really mix in Cubase much; I might take the instrument channels I have enabled and assigned like a group or even make a group from those, but the fact of all the automation mapped in one place means I handle the details on the VE Pro end. I'm loading most FX in it. I'm automating, ie., mixing in vastly more detail using it. I still like to record some automation live interacting with the GUI [eg., Reaktor], and that has to happen at the DAW end.
But I'm not cluttering up Cubase's mixer a lot.

The MIDI goes to, the audio comes back from VE Pro through a CAT6 cable via gigabit LAN, in terms of your windows slave. To the DAW host it is a multitimbral instrument.
However you can send audio to it instantiated as an effect; but the audio coming back is via the instrument connection.

The cons of it vis a vis Logic, relative to eg., Cubase is that the AU protocol does not provide for multiple MIDI ports so you'd use up an instance when you hit your 16 channels ceiling. There is a workaround but it's not elegant. That said, there is no other plugin I know of that would even provide multiple ports, only VST3 does it.
(eg., Kontakt shows you four ports but the plugin cannot do anything with it)
Also takes a bit more setup in Logic owing to the whole aux channels manual setup. But! It's more robust than everything else you'll try, I'd be confident of that assertion.

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**edit** I R SMRT
Meh.

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to add to jancivil post...
audio is 'expensive' to send over a network, so its more efficient to 'pre mix' ( with fx etc) and send back one audio stream, rather than send back mutliple audio streams to 'the host' to mix... also of course it means the fx processing is also on your 'vst host' which is useful.

vep allows you to run multiple hosts etc, so leaves the choices up to you...

of couse you can do this without Vep, with hardware interfaces/soundflower/network midi, but personally i found this 'cobbled together' solution required alot of 'maintenance' ... time i wanted to spend on music making rather than tech... ( and im a software engineer by trade ! ) - my only surprise is vep is the only remaining solution!

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Before the automation mapping I was returning a lot of channels. Now, for instance I have a project up that's approaching the maximum I'm going to be able to do before things start breaking up; but in four instances I have reduced the returns to 14 stereo outs. It is 'expensive' and I probably should simply return one stereo out per, but in terms of monitoring ["Wait, what goes on here?"] I'm looking at enough differences, or even ww vs brass, giant gong things vs drum kit, that I like to see levels for as groups.

Of course the automation is in lanes in the DAW host; I want to be clear about what I do at the 'Cubase' mixer, I have eg., the 14 instrument channels, a couple of bits I committed to audio and a couple of EQ inserts I like to write on with the mouse, per a massive apocalyptic template. If I have a really involved sound design with numerous convolution 'verbs I will send one or two things from Cubase to VE Pro via audio input, but that is the most 'expensive' thing you can do I think. Some people get the notion to send a hundred channels of audio to it and don't get why it doesn't actually happen. ;)

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