using cakewalk in live performances ?

[tonyc]

does anyone out there use any cakewalk or any daw in this matter in live gigs ? do you pack your laptop or pc and  use your daw on stage on live performances ? if yes how do you deal with dropouts and slow loading ???  

[James Argo]

I used to use Cakewalk in my laptop during -set arranged- performance many years ago. I did not use it to playback sequencer, but rather to bulk MIDI bank / program change to 6-7 MIDI gears at once. I save all bank / program change within a song in a project, and connect my laptop to live MIDI gears. Big time saver, and I didn't have to worry about forgetting what sound should be loaded on synth A for particular song. Loading was not a problem since it was MIDI only data, and most of the time I only need to load 1 project before the show. Data of different songs were arranged / aligned in every 5 sequential measures, and add marker. So all I need to do was to scroll to (eg) measure  6 and hit play a measure to switch to second song, and so on.

Edited February 21, 2019 by James Argo

[Matthew Carr]

I've used Cakewalk in a live scenario before. I found the best approach was to abandon the cakewalk playlist program, set options so that only one project can be loaded at a time in Cakewalk, and use a program called midi automator to to create a setlist which will open a project file for each track in order, in response to a midi signal (or keypress). If you have any backing in your projects,  freeze the backing tracks so the VSTs don't need to be loaded when the project is loaded.  Search for "Cakewalk Midi Automator" once the cakewalk forum is back up.

[RobertWS]

I've never done it but I've heard you should turn off as many background tasks as possible to avoid having something start up in the background:  Anti-virus, internet, disk-compression, etc.

[msmcleod]

Having been badly burned using my Amiga live in the 80's, I've steered away from using computers live.

At first I used an Alesis DataDisk when things were all MIDI (it was also great for sending custom patches via sysex and setting up my patch list for the next song). Then I moved on to the SMPro V-Machine (a poor man's, very under-powered version of a Muse Receptor), mainly using it to play sf2 versions of my plugins/hardware sounds, although it can cope with some CPU friendly VSTi's:

Of course nowadays, laptops are built to be portable and should be fine on the road... not sure I'll get over the scars though!