Were upgrading our setup at the club. On the way is an X32 and we'll be purchasing a new desktop PC that will run Reaper to track the bands that ask for it.
As for lighting, I'd really love to run DMX software on this same PC with a touchscreen and have an all in one solution. Reaper itself, is very lightweight and doesn't tax CPU or memory much at all even when recording up to 32 tracks. It has been rock solid for me on an old ass dell laptop with 3g ram and core 2 duo processor. It doesn't even break a sweat with Reaper.
However, I'm not familiar with how much processing DMX software uses. I'm considering one of the free options like Freestyler or MagicQ + the enttec dongle.
Ideally we'd have a dedicated lighting PC but if we're gonna do that I'd probably just get a Show designer 1. But I've worked in clubs with touch screen setups and as for running sound and lights at the same time I've come to prefer that over a hardware controller.
Another thing is that more often than not the sets won't be recorded, only when bands ask and are willing to pay, which is maybe 15% of the time. So usually it'd just be the DMX software running, and some music playback in between sets.
The PC I'm considering has 12g ram, i5 3.1 GHz processor. I really don't imagine that this would be too much on the system, but was maybe thinking that perhaps DMX software and audio software don't play nice with each other...not sure. Absolute worst case scenario would be the PC locks up and we'd lose lighting or they'd do something weird, but we can always keep the basic elation controller we have now as a backup.
Has anyone done something similar?
