I’m looking at using the JD-XA as a rompler. Good choice?
The JD-XA can cover a wide range of bread and butter sounds for gigs using its 400+ PCM waves. We use one regularly for gigs that require strings, electric pianos, sound FX, guitar stuff, organ and more. The only thing missing is a solid piano sample, though the one onboard can be tweaked to get some useable results.
What is zero-latency monitoring?
If you’ve ever experienced a slight delay between triggering a sound in your DAW and hearing it come out of your speakers or headphones, you’ve encountered latency. As computers have got more powerful over the years it’s become less of a problem – you can now play virtual instruments with pretty much no delay, for example – but there are times when it can still be an issue.
The most common example is when you’re trying to overdub a live instrument or vocal recording on top of one or more tracks that you’ve already recorded. Typically, you’ll be wearing headphones when you do this and listening back to a DAW mix of your existing tracks and the new recording, but if there’s any kind of latency here, playing or singing in time can be pretty much impossible. You can negate this problem to some extent by lowering the buffer size in your audio settings, but doing this can lead to glitches and poor performance.
The solution is a zero-latency monitoring option, which you’ll find on many audio interfaces these days. When you use this, the audio signal you’re recording is routed directly to your headphones so there’s zero delay in you hearing it back. It’ll be mixed in with the signal coming from your DAW, enabling you to stay exactly in time.
With a regular audio interface, the downside to working like this is that you can’t track through your favourite plugin effects, but some interfaces, such as Universal Audio’s Apollo range, take things a step further by letting you dial in DSP-powered effects at input stage.
Should I be investing in a Mac Mini?
On the face of it, the Mac Mini looks like a great computer if you want to go down the Apple route but don’t need a laptop. Because it’s literally just a box – it doesn’t come with a display, keyboard or mouse – the price is relatively low (you can pick one up for as little as £479), so if you already own these peripherals or are happy to source them yourself, the machine enables you to enter the Mac world pretty affordably.
Which would all be great if it weren’t for the fact that the Mac Mini hasn’t been updated since 2014 – a lifetime ago in computing terms. To put that into context, that was around the same as the launch of the iPhone 6.
The upshot of this is that the Mac Mini is considerably less powerful than Apple’s other desktop machines, and not a great buy at this stage. We love the concept of it, but as things stand, we can’t really recommend it.
The more positive news is that Apple boss Tim Cook has said that
the company is planning on making the Mac Mini “an important part” of its product line in the future, so an update is certainly possible.
What’s happening to Cakewalk’s music software now?
After Gibson ceased development of it in 2017, it looked like it could be the end for Cakewalk’s music software – which includes the Sonar DAW – but a knight in shining armour has emerged in the form of BandLab, the company behind the eponymous online music creation platform. They’ve purchased Cakewalk’s IP in its entirety, and have said that they plan to continue to develop “the core code base” of the products going forward.
This seems to suggest that Sonar and Cakewalk’s plugins and apps will continue to exist in some form, though it’s not yet clear exactly what that will be. BandLab have said that more information on the product roadmap will be shared in due course, and we’d speculate that some kind of crossover with their online DAW is likely. For now, though, all we can do is watch and wait for further announcements.