Working with two Mac's

Hi All

I am working with a friend on a collaborative project, and we are planning a fun jammin day on Friday 30th. He is coming to my place with his iMac, MIDI keyboard, and NI Maschine etc. I also have a Macbook Pro, several hardware synths (VirusTI, KORG RADIAS, KORG karma), plus a NI Maschine Mikro too.

He uses Logic Pro, and I use Cubase 4.

I am wondering how people have their rig or set-up sorted when jammin ‘live’ in a home based studio with someone else…? Is there a way of sharing the MIDI generated from each of our machines to both Cubase and Logic…? or am I a few sandwiches short of a picnic…?

I am going to be generating MIDI and perhaps some audio from my gear, as is my mate… but we want to work on the same project. Can this be done, or do we have to look at another method of accomplishing something similar with file sharing such as DropBox.

Thanks in advance…

John

You can define MIDI inputs and outputs in Cubase, as you can with audio. There are MIDI splitboxes available, as are audio splitters. Depending on interfaces, you can provide signals in different formats to different sources. So it all depends on what exactly you want to do?

Thanks for this thinkingcap, much appreciated.

What I will want to do is;

Play and record each of my synths as MIDI data, play and record my Maschine - but I would want the MIDI data sent to Cubase, and Logic on his iMac too. So, when either of us plays back the track, it triggers the relevant synth etc.

I appreciated plug-ins may not work as they won’t necessarily be on both machines (as in the case of my Virus TI VST plug-in for example) - so we would bounce these to audio tracks when required. It would be good to have the audio track on each machine though.

Alternately, I wonder if one machine could be set to trigger the other and then get it to play the track on its DAW?

Any advice gratefully received. Many thanks.

John

Like I said, you can send Cubase´s MIDI track input two different outputs - try it. Sending recorded MIDI info back to the synth you´ll have to switch cables though.
the audio routing can be accomplished in a similar way though I´d do that in the interface if possible.

I don´t know if I understand you crrectly here, but you can sync Cubase to MIDI timecode

Like I said, you can send Cubase´s MIDI track input two different outputs - try it. Sending recorded MIDI info back to the synth you´ll have to switch cables though.
the audio routing can be accomplished in a similar way though I´d do that in the interface if possible.

Ahhh, I think I understand this.

So, I play a synth and send the MIDI on say, channel 1, and have two Cubase tracks set to receive MIDI input Channel 1. Then on track 1, I have the output to say, wherever it came from (i.e. the synth I played), and for track 2 I have the output sent to… somewhere else? How would I route this track 2 output to go to one of the inputs in Logic Pro on my mates iMac?

I also have a MOTU 128 MIDI device, I guess I could sent the MIDI back to a channel on that, and route through to the iMac?

Hmmm, now I think I am starting to get somewhere…

Youu don´t need two MIDI tracks you can use MIDI sends (see manual)

Well, you´d have to use the hardware output of a MIDI interface, then patch a cable to your mate´s interface´s input. If you only have one MIDI output then that is not an option, since you´ll probably need that for the synth(s).
I´m so so firm in Mac-Land, but there might be some MIDI-over-lan software solutions to do create virtual MIDI ports via LAN connection.