Latency in a Live Setting with the stand alone app

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Hey everyone, I’m curious to know who is having the best success with latency within the GM2 stand alone app.

For context, I’m a full time live performer and bought GM2 for the sole purpose of adding violin solos to my band - also with the hopes of not having another person on the band bar tab every night. But specifically, I bought Audio Modeling’s SWAM VIOLIN. It’s sounds great, and I’m very happy with it overall. But the lag simply won’t cut it during a live show.

Ok here’s the thing, I’m running this on an old MacBook Pro mid 2012 2.9 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7 - I wasn’t sure how committed I was to this endeavor - don’t come at me for this! But now I’ve decided that I’m gonna upgrade to whatever it takes to make this happen on a live stage.

So my question is: what is the optimal system to have this running at the LOWEST POSSIBLE LATENCY in a live setting. I’m partial to MAC’s but if something else got me there I would make the switch in a heartbeat.

My Audio Interface is currently the Apollo Twin (Thunderbolt connection to my Mac). And I play a Tele, on the off chance any of this matters.

Looking for any help or thoughts anyone might have. Keep in mind, I only want this for one instrument (Violin) to break up the guitar solos during a set. I only need some reverb and delay on that baby, cause it sounds so good as is. Appreciate any insight you might have. Thanks!

Ryan

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Hello Ryan, welcome to this forum :slightly_smiling_face:

I can’t advise you on Mac products as I use Windows.

But I can point you in the right direction on how to use and optimise a computer with audio plugins.

Personally, although I have a new Intel 2022 i7-12750H PC with 32GB of RAM, I’m still using an old 2012 i5-3320M PC with 8GB of RAM as a spare, configured exactly like the new PC.

I play live with an audio interface set to 256s./44.1kHz.
I play with Gig Performer, a plugin host in which Midi Guitar (plugin) is integrated as a send point to numerous audio plugins (amps, fx, loopers, etc.) and MIDI plugins (synths, arpeggiator, sample players, etc.).
I don’t experience any annoying latency despite using 10 to 20 audio / MIDI plugins simultaneously (including, for example, the SWAM Brass bundle).

Tips:

When playing live, there’s no need to set the audio interface to more than 44.1 kHz and 128s to 256s is a good setting.
For Swam, be sure to check the instrument’s attack settings.

MOST IMPORTANT: optimise your computer for real-time audio applications.
My PCs are dedicated solely to audio and are fully optimised: no applications other than for audio, uninstallation of everything that is not necessary (programmes, routines, utilities, background services, etc.).
During live performance, disconnection of Internet, firewall, antivirus, etc.

For the Mac, although I don’t know anything about it, I suggest you read these 2 pages, which are geared towards using Gig Performer, but most of which will be useful to you.

OPTIMIZE YOUR MAC FOR A GIG
CLEVER WAYS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR PLUGIN USAGE

Other users of this forum may be able to give you additional information.

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Hey Herold! Thanks so much for responding, very much appreciated!

First off to reply to some points you made:

  • The computer is solely dedicated to this GM2 - no internet, antivirus, other programs running etc. I do have Mainstage on this Mac and have tried it with GM2, but it’s not noticeably any different
    -I’m not sure what you mean by SWAM’s “attack setting”? I haven’t messed with the settings too much BUT I forgot to add that I have midi mapped to Seaboard. Not sure if that makes a difference either.

I will add that my experience with GM2 and SWAM has not been all that bad at all, it’s been a lot of fun actually,…it’s just every so often things don’t respond and I’d like to work everything out before I take it to the stage. Thanks Herold, I’m off to read that link you shared!

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Minimize the UI when you’re actually playing. For me, on Mac, it seems to take up an unjustified amount of resources, causing crackles much earlier than when its hidden and I can set lower latencies when it is.

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Thanks Normen…I literally had it full screened the whole time today haha. I’ll see what happens when I open it tomorrow. Every little bit helps, thanks!

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Good point, I’ve given up on Arturia plugins whose GUI was too resource-hungry.