Minimal reason hardware setup

[JunctionArsonist]

Hi everyone,

Wondering if anyone has put together a super-minimal reason setup.

Basically, i wanted to set up my old weighted 88 key midi controller in the living room for my children who are 1 and 3 years old. I have always found dedicated synth or piano sample hardware too limiting, so i was hoping to put together an old propellerhead balance and laptop computer to run reason. it started making me think how cool it would be if there were embedded computer platforms that could run reason... i think it will be a while before a raspberry pi type device can run reason and radical piano... maybe the nnxt is not out of reach when it comes to raw computing power...

anyway... the laptop is not exactly kid friendly, so maybe an NUC or mac mini and miniature display ?https://www.newegg.ca/aoc-i1601fwux-16- ... 0031-001F3

has anyone done anything similar?

[diminished]

I use Reason Lite (it's free!) on an old netbook, 2GB RAM, Intel Atom N570, upgraded with a small SSD running Win10, all visual effects turned down. It works okay but even with ASIO4ALL, glitches/latency is an issue. The moment everything breaks down completely is when you use a device from the recent past like Europa or RV7000 in convolution mode. But Thor and Substractor by themselves are okay.
My advice with children that young, especially if you were to spend money anyways, is to buy a decent digital piano and let them have access to it whenever they want. A cheap one like the Thomann DP26 will do, great keys. You'll have fun with it too! It's only one button to turn on and you have instant great piano sound (and not so great other instruments, oh well.).
Synths and computers is for 4-5+ year olds from my experience. Before that they don't systematically explore their abstract environment and just smash buttons

[diminished]

Another idea would be to hook up an old phone to some speakers, run Caustic (or whatever there is in the iOS world with MIDI support) and connect an USB MIDI controller via an USB-OTG adapter.