This site talks a lot of using loops in worship and I wanted to take a minute and talk about how to setup your laptop for playing any kind of audio live off your Mac. This posts focuses on mac because if you are relying on a windows machine to play any kind of live audio then you’ve already violated rule #1 which is:
When using a computer for any important, enjoyable or useful purpose make sure it’s a Mac.
If you’re still reading I’ll assume you haven’t violated rule #1 and congratulate you on your complete salvation. The 7 steps below will make sure that only your intended audio will be played on not any system alerts, make sure your system is isolated and configure display settings. It won’t get into specific application settings or audio interface settings. I’ll dive into those in separate posts for a specific application. This is a general post for all apps running on a Mac.
1. Quit all non-essential applications
Make sure you “quit” and not close.
2. Turn off Wi-Fi (no network connection)
If your machine has a network connection all sorts of background processes will fire, like MobileMe syncing, Time Machine backups, etc… You don’t want any CPU diverted from your audio apps.
3. Turn off system audio alerts
You don’t want any audio sent to any speaker set that isn’t coming from your main audio app. Goto System Preferences and select Sound.
Uncheck all 3 system alerts options.
Even if you have your system alerts selected to play through internal speakers instead of your audio interface, you still don’t want these alerts to play.
4. Set display settings
You don’t want your display going into a screen saver or sleeping during a live performance. Set your screensaver to never turn on by going to System Preferences and clicking “Desktop & Screen Saver”.
Now set your Energy Saving settings so your display doesn’t just shut off.
Remember to set your display settings back after you’re done performing so you don’t kill your display. You need to have a screen saver and the energy saver on normally.
5. Turn off Bluetooth
Another step that isolates your machine from other devices. You don’t want file transfer requests popping up in the middle of a set.
6. Disable remote controls
A common trick to play on someone with a Mac is to mess up their presentation with the apple remote. If you need to use your apple remote live than pair the remote so only your remote will work. Otherwise if you don’t need it, just easiest to turn it off.
Go into System Preferences and click on Security.
Disable remotes.
7. Configure application to use your audio interface
There are a lot of audio interfaces out there to use with your laptop. Just make sure in your application’s settings that you configure it to use your audio interface.
At this point you should be safe from all unexpected sounds, connections from other devices, malicious remote jokes and unexpected display screen savers and sleeping.
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Great post. While I have taken steps to optimize for live audio I hadn’t thought of a few of those. Have you considered setting up a separate a login account just for audio so you don’t have to change all the settings every time you want to do audio? I tried this, but I guess I didn’t find it practical or maybe even necessary, because I generally just use my standard account.