EXPERIMENT, ios, virtual pc and vsts: Help Required.

wingwizard

Ok. I hadn’t bothered putting this up here but if anyone would like to help I’d really really appreciate it, im fact I’m asking any adventurous minds.

I recently conducted a little experiment by using a paperspace virtual machine (5 quid a month and cheap hourly rate) through my iPad, to access east wests complete library of vsts. I specifically wanted to explore lots of weird world ethnic sounds etc.

So it broke down like this:

• 5 quid plus tiny hourly rate for a cheap paperspace vm

//in order to improve access.. this was a bit difficult… I used moonlight app, plus sunshine on the vm to trick it into using a non Intel GPu, and achieved THIS by using tail space I think it’s called which puts your vm and iPad on the same virtual network so you can use moonlight. This is not necessary and I’m not sure if it works well as I had a few shutdowns but it was very quick when working. I thought I’d add this in case anyone else ever wanted to try.//

• then just dload whatever daw or trial daw you want on your virtual pc, which you’ll be accessing through moonlight if as above. Usb mouse is better with moonlight over browser.

• THEN.. I did a month student sub to composer cloud giving me access to all their libraries. I like it I can just dload and use and search whatever I want at a time. It’s a bit fiddly setting it up but I did it.

• here’s where my plan kicked in. I exported all of a track recorded in logic except one instrumental track as audio, put in onto my vm through files/Dropbox/whatever cloud storage and opened it in my pc daw. I then converted my instrumental track to MIDI and exported that the same way. In my virtual pc daw I can then try the instrumental MIDI track alongside the rest of teh song using all the east west library samples. And edit the MIDI. Then when I’m happy, render that track as audio and export back out to my iPad, open in my original logic project and replace the instrumental track with this audio.

This was me trying to find a way, cheaply, as someone who only uses an iPad, to gain access to loads of ethnic or orchestral or sample libraries on pc on the few occasions I need them for some odd part. The example was a suona part (there’s now a suona on geoshred). It’s pretty cheap, it was just difficult to work out how yo get set up, but once you are it’s actually really simple and quick exporting back and forth.

I mean it’s thousands of pounds worth of sample libraries for 10 pounds a month if you just use when you’re doing your production. Then a bit over 5 a month for the vm rather than 1000 for a music workstation.

Now though, im wondering if it might be possible to use a MIDI keyboard or controller with the vm. I had assumed not but I’ve since seen lots of people doing that while accessing vms through anither pc. I’ve seen talk of usb connections etc usb MIDI… has anyone tried this? Would anyone like to chime on or help? I’m not well versed in it despite the above.

Usb kb and mouse works fine with the vm. It would be pretty incredible, as the lag was very very low with moonlight, if I could mess about playing vsts through my iPad this way.

gusgranite

I think you’re asking if you can send midi from an iPad app to a virtual machine running in the browser?

Good question!

wingwizard

@gusgranite said:
I think you’re asking if you can send midi from an iPad app to a virtual machine running in the browser?

Good question!

Haha yeah I was. I just read back my own message and got a headache but that was it.