RE: wanted: MIDI watchdog

["Bernhard Wagner" <loopdelightml@nosuch.biz>]

At the Y2K4 live looping festival, Bob Rice did a set with Richard Zvonar.
Bob has worked with e.g. Frank Zappa, Lyle Mays, Chick Corea.
Apparently, his USP is to have two identical set-ups running 
simultaneously.
So when one fails he switches to the other and starts fixing the first 
which
then functions as the backup for the second.
Maybe you can use a second laptop as a backup which periodically
synchronizes with the first?
You would feed the output of both laptops into a switchable MIDI box, like
MIDIman/M-Audio 3X8 MIDI through box - which is a box that will take the
signals sent to three different inputs, and then route them to the eight
outputs
using physical three-way switches located on each of the eight output
channels, which can be altered by hand, on the fly.
When Laptop #1 crashes, you flick the switch, now feeding MIDI from Laptop
#2

Bernhard
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rainer Thelonius Balthasar Straschill [mailto:rs@moinlabs.de]
> Sent: Samstag, 5. Marz 2005 12:26
> To: Looper's Delight Mailing List
> Subject: wanted: MIDI watchdog
>
>
> Do any of you know of a device that does the following:
>
> It will react to a lack of MIDI clock (or a lack of a defined MIDI
> message recurring regularily) and when this event occurs, start to
> either
>
>       * send a MIDI message
>       * start to play something itself (i.e. cheap drum machine, loop
> (!))
>
> And it should be cheap! And it shouldn't be a piece of software.
>
> The idea behind this. I don't trust in laptops. With the setup I'm
> currently about to create, situations are imaginable where the musical
> flow will be endangered when the laptop crashes. So if it fails, I want
> something to continue "in the beat".
>
>       Rainer
>