Using two Evans Portals on one Mac (including cymbals in a large setup)

Support
1

Hi everyone,

I’m planning a larger acoustic kit with multiple toms, snare, kick, hi-hat and several cymbals, and I’m wondering if it is possible to run two Evans Portal interfaces simultaneously on a single Mac with Sensory Percussion 2 so that I can comfortably cover all drums and cymbals.

If this is supported:

  • Are there any specific requirements or recommendations for the Mac hardware (CPU model/generation, number of cores, RAM)?

  • Is there a minimum or recommended RAM size (e.g. 16 GB vs 32 GB) for stable performance with two Portals and a larger number of sensors, including cymbals?

  • Are there any known limitations or issues when connecting two Portals to the same machine (USB bandwidth, aggregate device setup, driver conflicts, etc.)?

If this is not officially supported, I’d also be grateful for any workarounds or alternative setups you’ve successfully used (for example, using two computers, or combining one Portal with another interface) for larger kits with several cymbals.

Thanks in advance for any help and for sharing your experience!

Arnd

2

The easiest way I have found yet is to open one instance of stand alone and one instance of the plugin and set each interface separately.

Alternatively I HAVE had some luck forcing Ableton to open two separate instance of sensory percussion plugin on Ableton and create an aggregate device between my two portals, but this is extremely glitchy currently. Tbh I rarely need more than 7 actual sensors and tend to find filling the rest in with traditional piezzo triggers or Roland pads works wonderfully.

3

Also aggregate devices are a Mac thing. You’ll need third party software to do this on Windows