I am probably the only mainstage user here.. yet its still the perfect program for anyone that wants to use VSTs or in this case the AU units on a mac.. its easy accessible and programmable...

I have gathered a huge amount of information about mainstage and stickied it to the Mainstage board at Keyszone

( Offtopic : I plan to do so on more keyboard related items... to give people an easy way to get to information and resources... its much easier to have everything in one need place then having to browse all over the web for answers... the selection offcourse will be expanded based on user input...)

Anyway, whats your opinion about mainstage, its only €30 and comes with more virtuall instruments then NI complete...

As well as regular gigs, it looks like something that would be very handy to bring on a macbook if I was going on holiday, and connect to whichever keyboard controller was available locally. As an outsider to VSTs and the likes, something like the Akai Advance makes this look less daunting. It helps to remove the feel of starting from scratch. I will aim to browse through your set of links, to see if there are some nice simplified clips to help people like me start in on using this nice and slowly.

I've been doing some reading about MainStage too ... I don't bring a laptop currently on gigs, but it seems like MainStage would be a powerful and inexpensive "app" to have (along with a decent controller). From what I read, even the included VI's sound very good (pianos, organs, synths, etc.) and the app is only $29!

-Jim

Thanks for the info. One quick caveat before I start: I am biased against Apple as a company. I view Apple as a greedy company with not much ethics more so than many others. I try not to get into Apple products but after reading your post on Mainstage some months ago, I toyed with the idea of getting an Macbook Pro but dropped the idea in the end as I did not want to deal with two OSes. The next thing, I was given an Macbook Pro! Well, it was just a natural thing to shell out $30 to buy MS. I think that the $29 MS is Apple's bait to get people hooked on their expensive hardware.

No question that Apple is a better environment for auido/midi. I will use MS just because the hardware was given to me, but I have no plans to upgrade the hardware. So probably I won't really get deep into MS. Besides, I did test drove MS a little bit and I may be wrong but I don't think it would handle very well a controller like a midi accordion sending PC messages on multiple midi channels and changing multiple sounds smoothly all at once. I hear from MS users about the high CPU usage of MS, too. That won't be good when loading multiple VSTs. In the meantime, I stumbled upon Gig Performer. It is so powerful and yet easy to use. Low CPU usage. It allows me to use my VST instruments like hardware. Instant sound changes with a neat feature called patch persist make sound changes very smooth. I understand your Kronos has that feature, but very few other modules and keyboards today have that feature.

Once again, I appreciate your post and the wealth of info.

I agree with you that apple is overly expensive, but for that money you get a high end product from the highest build quallity, with very very stable operating system, just because the fact apple does not have to support tons of hardware... on to of that, apple keeps its vallue.. 3 year old macbooks still sell for o er half of the new vallue.. which makes the total costs of a macbook certainly more acceptable... also keep in mind that the windows competitors to the macbooks called ultrabooks are also very very expensive products.. these are the competitions answer to the macbook hardware quallity, and they cost about 3/4 of the price of a macbook pro.. for a system with comparable performance..


And yes, apple is expensive, by nature, thats also because they dont aim at poor people's money, but at the rich people.. why is a mercedes much more expensive then a totyota?


For me having mainstage ( and logic for under €200 with lifelong free uodates where comparable daw software costs €500 with another €150 update every 2 years) and the prices of used macbooks make the investment worth it... i currently have a 2011 macbook that still runs things just fine.. the hardware is still in perfect condition, only did an upgrade to 16GB memmory and an SSD... and its running mainstage on the highest level..


Gig performer certainly seems to be the way to go on a windows system... but dont forget that mainstage at the much lower price comes with a set of sounds comparable to Native instruments komplete in quallity and quantity.. when you buy apple mainstage, you dont need any other VST's. They are an option. When younbuy gig performer you will need to buy the sounds sepperately, meaning another €500 for NI komplete or another all around package. If you allready have the VSTs, its not a thing, but when starting out, its a huge difference..

Patch maintain, certainly is a huge thing, but the lower CPU use is a claim by the manufactorer.. domt get me wrong, i think gig performer is a great. Program, and certainly the way to go on windows systems... but if you have an apple and use mainstage, i dont see any reason to switch to gig performer.. because, when i look at gig performer, all i see is a mainstage clone, but a darn good one...

In the future however, with gig performer still being developed and getting more and more features, and mainstage dont moving anywhere for the last few years, inwould not be surprised if in a few years gig performer has overtaken mainstage by a large margin... unless apple takes up the gauntlet and starts further development for mainstage again.. personally i think having competition is allways a good thing for the customers..

Interesting this patch persist, as it appears it can hold the notes of the old sound but leaves the notes of the new sound to play separately, as while current instruments maintain the sound of the previous patch (Such as sustain on strings) rather chopping it off when a new sound is selected, also if you press the sustain pedal it will hold the previous patches sounds, and the new patches sound as well. (It’s such a simple thing, it makes you wonder why no one thought of it before as the current system came out in the 80s)
Bill

Its on the kronos...

Its not possible with many of the current keyboards as how they are programmed... if i select a new right one sound, its put in exactly the same channel as the old sound, because the number of channels is restricted..

On a computer with mainstage or gig performer, you have as many channels as you want and these things are much easier to implement..

Bachus,
Gig Performer gives me an "Apple" experience in my Windows hybrid tablet. That would be my utmost praise of Mac as a DAW platform considering my "bias" against Apple as a company. I agree that some of the Windows tablets/notebooks are way up there in prices. However, in Windows world there are many ways and choices. I have 3 Lenovo tablets and one MS Surface Pro. The latest Lenovo of mine is a 15.6 inch hybrid tablet with i7, 16 RAM, and 2 TB Samsung SSD plus. It was a brand new and it cost me $1,300. Well, I had a kid take out the factory SSD and install the 2 TB Samsung SSD.

After reading your posts on the Kronos and a video demo by a black gospel music by chance, I was sold on it. I wanted one, but I knew that I would not carry it around to gigs. So I decided to go more software instead especially when my arranger is software vA2. I will Main Stage just because the hardware was given to me, but I'm afriad that I might want to upgrade to a Mac MINI down the road if I get too deep into Main Stage.

It dawned on me just now. Is there such a thing as a Mac clone?
I googled it real quick. I found this article entitled "Apple Squeezes Mac Clones Out of the Market Dan Knight - 2014.01.25"
That reinforces my view of Apple as a closed system.

Yes there are build it yourself macintosh clones...

All information about it can be found on THIS WEBSITE from tonymac


Its just a matter of combining apple compatible hardware, everything works with the right components, even the appstore... and it has been working for years...


However will this keep working in the future? I think that mostly depends on Apple, as long as they dont care enough to spend a huge amount of development cost, this option stays open..


Since i still have a good working macbook (its almost 6 years old, nut runs everything just perfectly) i stayed away from "Hackintosh" as thats what these clones are named.. will i make that step in the future? possibly, it depends, for now i keep following this very closely..


But if you want to walk this road, its very very important to get the rght hardware as indicated on Tony MAcs website, it alos requires some hacking in the software depending on your build, and i would only advise advanced users with some level of programming skill to do so...