Can my Mac handle 2 interfaces simultaneously?

Hello all,

I need to expand my inputs for live performance and wanted some opinions on whether my mac could handle 2 interfaces (using Mac Audio Midi setup trick which works great) in the following setup:

- Guitar (+ possibly mandolin) > Rig Kontrol 3 > Guitar Rig 4 plugin
- 2 Microphones > Komplete Audio 6
- Percussionist's mini-mixer > Komplete Audio 6 line ins.
- ALL THE ABOVE running as separate tracks in Ableton Live 8 + 2 tracks for triggering backing songs/clips.

So that's 2 interfaces, 5 inputs, 7 tracks in Ableton.

Mac OSX 10.6.8
2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB RAM 1067MHz DDR3

Any help is appreciated as to whether you think it will work. Do I need to boost my RAM? Or does this setup really require 2 laptops?

Peace

Stew

You can use two interface, the only problem is latency. Not sure how good or bad is it, cos I never use two USB interface.

hi stew welcome to soft.

don't know about mac, and don't know about the mac audio midi setup trick, but from what I know usually DAW supports only operating of one audio interface at a time UNLESS you used something like an ASIO4ALL 3rd party drivers to run 2 audio interfaces at once. So I'm guessing you're doing the same thing in mac and for now I take it as "you can run 2 interfaces" :

from my experience with PC , should be safe as before I used cubase I was using cool edit pro which didn't support ASIO but I was able to use 3 audio interfaces PCI,Firewire + USB + even my realtek onboard soundcard + creative soundblaster at once. as long as I configured the inputs/outputs correctly on the DAW. but the serious problem was latency which I had to manually adjust after recording. but this was 8 years back on a pentium 4 non hyperthreading 1.4ghz 133mhz ram piece of junk.the recent experiment last year (I think? lost track of time) would be the ASIO4ALL combining my echo audio firewire and zoom r16 USB. same issue, latency. on a core2duo laptop 1.6ghz 333mhz ram.

actually if you already have both interfaces, why not give it a shot ? based on my old pc specs comparison with your current modern setup with a DDR3 ram advantage.

Last thing, Mac usually have two USB controller even with three or more USB port. Try attach one interface to one USB controller. I do not try on using two interface, but experience using USB HDD to USB HDD large file transfer. One USB HDD to one controller is better than two share one.

Hi Stew,
As you mentioned, the core audio aggregate device functionality should work to combine 2 interfaces together. I think your setup is not really that sample heavy so you should have no problem running out of RAM.

It's more likely that you would run out of CPU than RAM in your case. Also, how well it runs will depend on your USB drivers for your audio interfaces.

From the current looks of it though, it should be no problems seeing that there are already 8 input USB interfaces out there so bandwidth is probably not an issue.

Thanks for all the responses guys, I greatly appreciate it. I only have the NI komplete audio 6 right now but am heading out for the Rig Kontrol after all the advice above. I'm glad there's people out there who understand this stuff better than me. I'll post again when I've tested it all out (hopefully succesfully). Thanks again!

Hello. Yes Macs can represent two or more interfaces as one single unit. It's called an Aggregate Device. Instructions here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3956

Only drawback is you can't work your setup too hard at low buffer sizes.

Updating just for those interested, and in case anyone goes looking around the internet for answers like I did!
I tried the setup with Komplete Audio 6 and Rig Kontrol together as an aggregate device, and although it worked, it just wasn't practical. Hassle to setup, and still had some technical issues. Wouldn't recommend it. Better to just use 1 interface I suppose. Also the routing was a little complicated for certain tasks. Ended up just using the Rig Kontrol, which is a great piece of gear, but due to not having time to use it that much anymore, I'm selling it off with Guitar Rig 4. As I said, great software and gear, but it does need a fair bit of time to setup in order to sound good. Anyone getting into MIDI platforms should know that before buying / switching