Have you ever wished that you could use all your virtual instruments libraries for your keyboards or all these incredible virtual amps from your studio for your guitar or bass on stage?

Make your wish come true, then: most laptops are now powerful enough, and with lightweight host applications such as PatchWork and Axiom, you can load many instrument or effect plug-ins and recall them instantly. Just play them on stage!

Latency / Dropout Issues

So you already have a powerful Windows laptop, plenty of plug-ins, a great host application and you cannot get them to play live properly without getting dropouts (“pops”and “clicks”) all the time, unless the latency is ridiculously high? And the CPU usage is not even a problem?

By default, recent Windows laptops are definitely not configured for low latency audio – they are designed for office work / web browsing and saving batteries. In this tutorial we’ll show you how to optimize your Windows laptop or tablet in order to make it usable for real-time audio.

Using this method on a first generation Surface Book laptop, we were able to reduce the latency from (mediocre) 256 samples with occasional drop-outs (bad!), down to 48 samples without any single drop-out! Continue reading →