Every Mainstage Concert is divided up into patches, which are divided into channel strips. But once you start adding VST or AU instruments and add more patches, your clarity of programming presets might become less apparent and your obtained reliability becomes less than 100%, which is unacceptable! Mainstage still does what you are asking to do, but the chance of error become bigger. If you stick with the native presets within Mainstage, it is 100% reliable (except version 3.0.2 which gives you a constant CPU spike). I only have to carry my 10kg suitcase with 2 midi USB interfaces, that's it! Often when I rehearse there are already 2 keyboards available. With the multitude of softsynths available you have a multitude of possibilities within one portable machine. Up until a point that I spend way more time on programming a sound than preparing an actual song.Unless you have a roady or you like to show off it is a lot of stuff to carry around and expensive. The palette of sounds you can get is much wider than with many expensive synthesizers and I'm a sound whore. Also many synths come with their own specific color or character. How much would a Macbook pro cost with 6 USB 2.0, 2 USB 3.0, an i5 3570K, 19” screen, 250GB SSD and 16GB of RAM? The whole project did cost me about €800. My main reasons for building my own suitcase or rather toolcase Mac are financial, but also the fun of such a project. It actually occupies 5.3 GB of RAM, it takes 36 sec to start up and 7 sec to shut down with my SSD HDD. My current 61 Mainstage Patches sometimes have up to 9 channel strips each and contain a multitude of virtual instruments. You have to test everything AND check everything with every change or update you make in order to avoid bad surprises on stage (Steve Porcaro of TOTO had a Mainstage crash with his Macbook pro while on stage!). My experience: NEVER update anything before a gig without proper testing. The Hackintosh part can be an extra added problem, but doesn't need to. You can find a lot of questions about reliability around, so in order to quickly answer your first question: “Is it reliable?”, my answer is “Yes, with a big BUT”! First of all Version 3 seems to be more stable than V2 from what I've read. Mainstages versatility and ease of use AND price are just unmatched! But I don't think it suits everyone, especially onstage. This is my first “Mac” after having used Windows and Linux (Avlinux, still love it) OSes for years. I'd like to share with you in this lengthy article my experience so far using my Hackintosh (a Mac system built legally with PC components, see with Mainstage 3 as a keyboardist in a professional setting. Building a CustoMac Hackintosh: Buyer's Guide
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