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Linux Software Hardware

Solid-State Mini-ITX Linux Recording Studio HOWTO 242

Posted by timothy from the two-gigs-of-flash-aren't-isn't-cheap dept.
An anonymous reader submits "LinuxDevices.com has posted a project howto on building a dedicated music recording and editing computer that uses a CompactFlash card instead of a hard drive, to eliminate hard disk chatter. It uses the latest release from the Agnula (GNU/Linux Audio) project, and the newest Epia MII-12000 mini-ITX board from VIA. The method described in the article applies to embedding most any Knoppix-based Live CD onto CompactFlash boot media."
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Solid-State Mini-ITX Linux Recording Studio HOWTO More

Solid-State Mini-ITX Linux Recording Studio HOWTO

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  • Hmm (Score:3, Informative)

    by PktLoss ( 647983 ) * on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @02:33PM (#9318073) Homepage Journal
    Dont flash cards have a maximum number of write operations? Or is that USB keys?

    • Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @02:36PM (#9318109)
      >in just 650MB of Flash storage space that is mounted *read-only*, to maximize the life of the CF card.

      Looks like they thought of that.

    • Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)

      by bsd4me ( 759597 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @03:39PM (#9318860)

      Dont flash cards have a maximum number of write operations? Or is that USB keys?

      All FLASH devices have a limited number of write cycles. Looking at the specs for a random [intel.com] device shows that modern devices support over 100,000 write cycles, and I think this is per sector.

      A good device driver will use various techniques, such a wear leveling, to extend the life of the device.

  • Storage (Score:4, Insightful)

    by WarehouseCU ( 655929 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @02:33PM (#9318075)
    Exactly how much recording will be possible. At any decent quality you're going to require a whole lot of flash storage. Seems like soundproofing the case might be cheaper.

    • Re:Storage (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Short Circuit ( 52384 )
      Here's a thought:

      Keep an idle-quiet [storagereview.com] hard drive in the box, but don't mount it. Instead, write your raw audio data directly to the drive's device file.

      There won't be any seeking, so there won't be any noise. Write raw number of bytes of the total sample to the end of the drive, so you know where your data ends and garbage begins.

    • NFS? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Chibi Merrow ( 226057 )
      Since it's a Linux system, you could just use the Ethernet card to move files your done working with to long term storage on a file server outside of your recording room. 1.5GB of storage they mention in the article should be plenty for one session, which you can then fiddle with, move to storage, and record your next take/song/track/whatever. WAV file format is big, but it's not THAT big.

      • Re:NFS? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by LWATCDR ( 28044 )
        Why not just record to NFS share to start with? Set it up with 1000baseT and you should have plenty of bandwidth. Boot across the network and put a huge pile of ram on the system so you do not need swap and you should be good to go.

      • Re:NFS? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Lemmeoutada Collecti ( 588075 ) <obereon@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @03:24PM (#9318637) Homepage Journal
        I'd guess you've not worked with serious Studio recording. 1.5 GB is nothing during a single session, during which I for one don't want any hassles trying to transfer files. Once I get the artist warmed up, I don't stop until it's right. Any break in the continuity and it's start all over time.

        A single session can last from 30 minutes to several hours, during which mutliple instruments are being recorded. No compression, the lag and/or loss is intolerable on the master recording. This means fast access to the media (or good buffering), plenty of RAM, and the ability to reshoot a sequence (rewrite).

        Generally, no fiddling is done during the session on the recording, just tweaking on the input chain. I personally prefer retakes as seperate files, so they can be matched better on timing. Generally, given the option, I will have a complete passage rerecorded rather than just a few notes. (No, I do not work for the RIAA labels, how'd you guess?)

        The number of writes pretty much requires a highly rewritable media, and I question the slower, more limited flash usefulness in the media segment. For a boot drive, they are probably ideal, boot the studio with clean settings every time. Only problem? Linux does not have the variety of tools we use.

        • Dude, get over yourself. It's a 16bit, 48kHz, Stereo recording rig, so 1.5G of recording is like two hours. This isn't a $60k studio with bajillions of knobs and buttons for recording a whole symphony orchestra at once. Being just an SB Live in the system I don't think the 190kB/s data rate is going to out run the flash he clocked at 7MB/s, especially with enough ram in the system to hold a couple minutes of buffer.

          And again, this is a simple, relativly small and quiet, two channel recording rig. Audac

          • Re:NFS? (Score:4, Informative)

            by Kiryat Malachi ( 177258 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @04:55PM (#9319768) Journal
            If you want a simple, relatively small and quiet, two channel recording rig, with equivalent sound quality to this, I highly suggest buying a fucking Minidisc or DAT deck, a decent mixer, and a couple good mics. Then you can dump it to a machine with decent editing tools later.

            And the best part? It is silent.

            What the hell advantage does this system have over a DAT deck and a computer with editing software worth using? None, because its a two-track system using a consumer-level sound card. Any gains you might make in reducing hard drive chatter will be totally overwhelmed by the crap quality of your A/D subsystem.

            This thing is barely suitable for use as a two-track tracking machine, and there's no reason to edit on this thing as opposed to a decent PC which won't run into disk space or flash write limitations.
            • DAT I can't say, since I've never looked into it as a medium, but Minidisc is out of the window for most things since it uses lossy compression IIRC. That said IANASE(Sound Engineer)

              • Re:NFS? (Score:3, Interesting)

                by belmolis ( 702863 )

                It's true that the ATRAC compression that minidisc recorders use is lossy, but it is much less lossy than MP3 compression, and it is a "psychoacoustic" compression technique, designed to put the distortion where you can't hear it. For certain types of phonetic or psychoacoustic research you wouldn't want to use minidisc recording, but I am not sure that it would make any difference for music. I'd be interested to know if there are any objective studies showing that most people can tell the difference betwe

          • Re:NFS? (Score:3, Informative)

            by dgatwood ( 11270 )
            1.5G of recording is like two hours.

            That's only true if you're only doing recording of two channels for... say a concert. The second you start doing multitrack (and what's the point of a DAW if you aren't?) work, things balloon quickly.

            I'm in the finishing stages of putting together a CD. 16-bit, 44.1 kHz (48k for one project). Here are some numbers.

            Acoustic projects---one or two instruments and voice, 2-4 minutes
            Smallest: 1.04 GB
            Largest: 1.37 GB

            Band projects (4-10 minutes)
            Smallest: 2.23 GB

    • Seems like soundproofing the case might be cheaper.

      There's no such thing as sound-proofing a computer. You can install sound dampening material, but in order to completely stop sounds, you would have to plug all the holes, which means no cooling what-so-ever.

      It would be possible to design a completely silent computer, but definately not with current hardware.

  • About Time! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @02:33PM (#9318079)
    Thank god for this. Hard drive chatter totally ruined the last Bizkit album.

  • I've got the ultimate silent PC right here. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Biotech9 ( 704202 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @02:34PM (#9318086) Homepage
    Buy a nice shiny Dual G5, stick it in your hallway.

    And then buy a couple of 15 feet USB/Firewire cables [ramelectronics.net]to extend your keyboard, mouse, and external soundcards into your sound proof recording room.

    Voila!

  • Bummer (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wishus ( 174405 ) * on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @02:34PM (#9318090) Journal
    I wish they'd waited on the Delta 44. Going with the SB Live! makes this useless.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Not really (Score:3, Informative)

        by wishus ( 174405 ) *
        Sure the SB Live it's not über-pro, but isn't that bad either. In fact I'd say it's the best entry-level card around

        The Live is significantly noisier than the TB Santa Cruz, if you want to compare consumer cards. The "best entry-level card around" (for home recording) is probably the Audiophile 2496 [m-audio.com].

        The Live pretty much sucks for anything other than gaming.

        • Re:Not really (Score:3, Informative)

          by 13Echo ( 209846 )
          The only real problem is that the VIA Envy 24 series chips don't do hardware mixing on Linux. VIA claims that the standard Envy 24 (not the HT model) does it, but it only works in Windows. Frankly, I think that they are possibly lying though. The EMU chips and the CS46xx (like those in the Santa Cruz) are probably some of the best choices for audio on Linux, even if they are considered to be "consumer-grade". There is no doubt in my mind that some of M-Audio's hardware has a better S/N ratio and THD tha
    • I am curious, can anybody that has done this with either SBLibe or Delta 44 or anything higher end please respond.

      I cannot imagine that the SB Live would have a decent AD converter for the audio input. I know that a good 16 or 18 bit hi-fi audio AD converter (capable of working at 44 or 48 kHz) costs about $65 just for the AD chip itself (at least as of a few years ago). Now granted Creative would be buying whatever front-end AD converters they use in bulk so it would be cheaper. But I would be surpris

      • The SBLive and other consumer cards don't have good A/D converters. You can spend thousands on a good one. However, the Delta line of interfaces from m-audio [m-audio.com] have a good reputation for low-end DAWs.

        If you've already got a capable computer system, look at a Delta 44 and Cakewalk Home Studio 2004 (or Sonar 3, if you have the money). It would be much cheaper than a comparable analog system. Be careful, though - home studios are a big money pit. :)

  • Network boot (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jargoone ( 166102 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @02:34PM (#9318091)
    I understand the need for lack of hard drive noise. A network boot system would solve this problem as well. I've been playing with it at home just for fun, and it works well, and yields a surprisingly responsive system. There's an old-but-good article at tldp.org [tldp.org].

    • Re:Network boot (Score:3, Interesting)

      by On Lawn ( 1073 )

      Tell me becuase I honestly don't know. How much CPU is needed for your audio needs? The reason I'm asking is it seems that a driveless computer with a low-power chip (which Linux runs on a lot) would be great for the application. The problem being that they cost as much as the very top end Intel systems, much of which due to lack of demand (economies of scale and whatnot).

      A while back one could get a StrongArm in a 1U rack, but not any more. Oh well, I suppose I'm just hoping that some kind of market will
      • Tell me becuase I honestly don't know. How much CPU is needed for your audio needs?

        in my experience, you can never have too much CPU for audio processing, and you most likely will never have enough. better to put it in the closet or another room than compromise with something slower than the fastest chips you can afford.


        • If I can ask (becuase you've peaked my curiousity now) where do you find the need to be most keen in audio mixing?
          • Plugins for reverb, delay, compressor/limiters and other such "outboard" effects chew up huge amounts of CPU. Add software based synths and samplers and you have a pretty busy CPU.
        • Agreed. A/V apps are among the more demanding you will find on the desktop. Non linear editing suites stress every part of a system (CPU/RAM/DISK) and require fairly well configured machines, particularly if you are not using any external DSP or CPU offload gear. Top end Xeon or G5's are ideal candidates for this kind of thing, though my next DAW will be a PowerBook with an external Firewire A/D/A+DSP box (and maybe external disks too).

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @02:59PM (#9318367)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • apple (Score:4, Insightful)

    by millahtime ( 710421 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @02:35PM (#9318092) Homepage Journal
    This would be hard to get many of the professionals to do with the Apple or Mac compatible products out there

    This market has a lot of mac die harders, proven products and support. Plus, a lot of it can be done right on a powerbook.

    I see this project having a difficult time making a dent. It will need to become better than existing products and get some great support and PR.

    • Re:apple (Score:3, Insightful)

      by zangdesign ( 462534 )
      Not to mention the problems with space on the card. 2 GB may seem like a lot, but a recording session can eat that up in about a minute if you go multitrack.

      While I applaud the idea, a hard disk is the only way to go, esp. when it comes to mixing. If you're editing tracks you rip off a CD, then this is sufficient to handle the load.

      They need to go back and re-examine the needs of professional recordists, editors and mixers.
    • I see this project having a difficult time making a dent.

      Who said anything about making a dent? It's a homebrew project that achieves some reasonable capability on the cheap. Even once it's refined to the point where it equals professional gear in quality of output (if not ease of use), there will always be those who prefer to shell out the big bucks, for the prestige or whatever (they're audiophiles!).

  • looks great (Score:2, Interesting)

    by sjwaste ( 780063 )
    This looks like something a lot of part time musicians would love. I remember back in high school, we would record on a new but still shitty 4-track, direct to cassette. Sound quality always sucked.

    I wish I had thought of/seen this while still in college. It would've been a blast to play around with.

  • Firewalls/routers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gspr ( 602968 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @02:36PM (#9318111)
    This could also be very interesting for those who build DYI firewalls or routers. When I've wanted to make a firewall/router completely silent in the past, I've always had to disable as many reading/writing processes as possible, and use hdparm to send the drive to sleep after a few minutes of inactivity.
    • So you wold spend around 1000$ to build a router? You do know that you can BUY silent routers for a lot less?
    • This could also be very interesting for those who build DYI firewalls or routers. When I've wanted to make a firewall/router completely silent in the past, I've always had to disable as many reading/writing processes as possible, and use hdparm to send the drive to sleep after a few minutes of inactivity.

      Pick up a lower-end Pentium system, one without a CPU or case fan. The only fan you'll have is the power supply, which is very quiet. A firewall/router doesn't even need the horsepower that a Pentium pr

  • flash memory (Score:3, Informative)

    by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @02:37PM (#9318126)
    building a dedicated music recording and editing computer that uses a CompactFlash card instead of a hard drive

    Big problem with CompactFlash- you can kill the card. They have a very finite number of write cycles. It's in the millions, but you can burn through those VERY quickly if you aren't managing your writes. CompactFlash in a camera, for example, only sees sequential writes, so you can literally fill the card and erase it hundreds of thousands of times before it's zapped.

    The same may be true when recording, but when you start talking about editing, things get messy. God help you if you put swap on the card.

    CompactFlash also doesn't seem nearly fast enough for real time audio beyond maybe 1 or 2 channels.

    Really, I don't see the point. Use a laptop; many modern laptop drives are so quiet you can barely hear them in a dead silent room, and if they're too noisy, run your cables into another room, or put a pillow or box over it, etc. You can buy a ton of memory at decent prices and use ramdisks if you're really concerned about HD noise.

    • Re:flash memory (Score:2, Informative)

      by stratjakt ( 596332 )
      Run an ethernet cable to a SAN box in another room (or in a sound-deadening enclosure like a decent camping cooler)

      Throw your local root filesystem on the flash and leave it read only.

      Hooray!

    • Re:flash memory (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Ann Elk ( 668880 )

      They have a very finite number of write cycles.

      I wonder if anyone is researching special filesystems for compact flash storage. It seems to me it would be possible to design a filesystem that spreads data around the media to avoid (as much as possible) overwriting the same storage blocks.

      God help you if you put swap on the card.

      Compact Flash is slow, on the order of 8MB/second. Swapping to CF is a Bad Idea (for many reasons).

      • I wonder if anyone is researching special filesystems for compact flash storage.

        The field is well-researched and a patent minefield. Newcomers beware.

        It seems to me it would be possible to design a filesystem that spreads data around the media to avoid (as much as possible) overwriting the same storage blocks.

        This is a gross simplification, but flash is not rewritable in-place like RAM or hard disk is. It must be erased in relatively large block sizes for the space to be writable again.

        To answer y

    • Re:flash memory (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Otto ( 17870 )
      He mounts the filesystem as read only to prolong the life of the CF card, although he does leave an extra writable partition on it. But he also sets up a ramdisk for the majority of file usage and such. While that is, of course, ephemeral, if you're doing some recording it's nice to be able to record into RAM first and then save it off to elsewhere when you're happy with it.

    • not-so sequential writes (Score:4, Informative)

      by vlad_petric ( 94134 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @03:02PM (#9318392) Homepage
      Everytime you modify a file on the filesystem, the file allocation table gets modified ... And pretty much everybody uses FAT16/FAT32 for CF cards.

      jffs2 [redhat.com] is much more conscious about write behavior, so I'd strongly recommend it for anything on a flash filesystem.

      Anyway, the main reason compact flash is rather slow is simply the fact that few people need high throughput. There are cards these days that sustain a throughput of 15M/s, but they're only meant for high-end cameras. While flash is slower than RAM, it's still considerably faster than mechanical devices, so I'd expect this number to go higher.

    • Compact flash cards do internal wear-levelling. That is, it spreads the writes around for you to avoid burning out a single erase block.
    • Obviously you don't want to swap onto Flash, if your machine can hold enough RAM for your application (and if it can't, you still want to store things in sequential files rather than random access paging, but that's not a problem for operating systems and software storage.) Lots of machines are limited to 1GB RAM, and anything with much more than that probably has a big fan. That isn't going to be enough if you want 8 tracks of music for 3-4 hours of rehearsal, even if you FLAC everything, so at some poin

  • Noise levels (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cagle_.25 ( 715952 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @02:39PM (#9318148) Journal
    Eliminating noise is a matter of degrees. You could easily move the tower outside the recording room -- but then you have longer cables, and you get noise from that. If you are playing an electric guitar, your pickups might grab stray signal from a monitor as well, which is really annoying when the amp is at "11". And, I recently discovered that flatscreens are much noiser than old CRTs in that regard.

    • Re:Noise levels (Score:4, Informative)

      by Kiryat Malachi ( 177258 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @02:47PM (#9318234) Journal
      The solution, of course, is to use real audio interfaces, which will have an external breakout box and digital interface back to the computer from that point. At that point, the length of cables back to the computer become a lot less important.

      For example, you could use a nice standalone A/D box with a ADAT-compatible output, then string your digital cable the 15 feet into your nicely isolated computer closet, where it enters an ADAT card. Run monitor and keyboard cables the 15 feet, and you have a system that can be as loud as it wants to be without getting anywhere near your recording.

      Of course, for real recording, you're going to want to isolate control from recording, so you can have a somewhat noisy computer in control (so long as its noise factor is less than what you can tolerate during mix and edit).

      This project is neat for geek factor, kinda like sticking SSH on your cellphone, but there are a lot of easier, more useable ways to minimize recorded noise.
    • Bah I get more noise from my mixer and other audio gear including the cables than I get from the PC in the home studio.

      a good rackmount case with filters and the fan's slowed down is almost silent. put it in a rack case with a door and it is 100% silent.

      sample a 1 second clip of nothing and subtract it from your recording and you remove all system noise.
      • sample a 1 second clip of nothing and subtract it from your recording and you remove all system noise. It's not exactly just subtracting, but that's besides the point, I'm trying to karmawhore here. In a linux setup, you can use good old flaky Gnome Wave Cleaner [sourceforge.net] for this. Make a backup of your wave first, then clean. Under Windows, cooledit (nowadays adobe audition) is decent for denoising.
    • Umm, does anyone set their amp to "11"? If our guitarist did that it would probably shatter the windows and deafen us permanently... in fact, his amp only goes up to "10".. what amp actually goes higher than that anyways? And why would you want to set it anywhere near that?!

  • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Yay (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jeddak ( 12628 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @02:44PM (#9318204)
    Another nonexistent problem is now solved!

    Hard drive noise is really the least of the noise problems in a modern studio. Speaking from personal experience.

    I mean, my power amp is louder than anything in my home project studio, including the computer.

    OK, mod me down, please.
    • I am an engineer so I do problem solving.

      Why create a product to solve a problem that doesn't exist. There isn't one. This is probubally why a corperate entity hasn't done this yet. It would fail to sell so why make it. At the same time in the OSS we need to look at the why we make things. Why waste our time generating something there is no call for.

      Before we generate things we need to look at the possible users of a product and their needs. This doesn't seem to have been done.
    • I hear you. The CPU fan would be far worse than the noise a hard drive makes.

      And I'm not exactly seeing the hackworthyness here either. Normally that much effort goes into taking an expensive idea and making it cheaper, not the other way around.

      • The fan won't be louder... Firstly, this is ITX so there isn't a fan on either the CPU or the PSU. Even if there was they will be referring to electrical noise, not accoustic noise.

        However, the grandparent may well be correct that the hard drive is not a problem. As I understood it, the PSU is the only component which often causes problems and the ITX can have the PSU in an external transformer if you want.

        Even if the hard drive is a problem, ITX already has the ability to boot off the network which has

  • What about other sounds. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by suso ( 153703 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @02:44PM (#9318205) Journal
    If you're going to go so far as to eliminate hard drive chatter then I would think you'd want to get rid of fan noise, monitor noise, speaker feedback, mouse click noise, etc. On some systems, a CRT can make quite a bit of noise that would interfere with recording.

    Sometimes, it's funny though to be watching a vcd and all of a sudden hear an "Uh oh" sound coming from someone's ICQ.

  • Skip the CF, use the network (Score:5, Interesting)

    by raddan ( 519638 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @02:47PM (#9318225)
    Why use expensive, SLOW flash memory when you can run a fast ethernet connection into the room and save on a remote volume? Use SMB, NFS, AFS, whatever, and then you get as much space as you want, and it's quiet to boot.

    2GB is a lot of data, but try working that in a professional studio- you can easy fill up 2GB with a half-hour of bad takes. If you're multitracking you can forget about it.

    But I like the idea of lost-cost hardware. A VIA MII 12000 is more than adequate (CPU-power-wise) for even 8 simultaneous 16-bit ins and outs. What you're really going to want is a good audio card. [rme-audio.com]

    • Um, my band uses a remodeled shed for recording. We only HAVE one room. I'm not putting our computer outside. What network are we going to connect to to mount an NFS share from? I do agree though, 2gb runs out very fast (depending on the quality you're recording at) and is definitely not sufficient for a decent quantity (time-wise) of recording. What would be really cool is one of those devices that burns straight to CD whatever audio is input to it :D even better, straight to DVD... As far as I know they
  • If you're doing a studio project with 4 instruments including a nice drum set, and it's a live band, you can expect to have at least 16 tracks, meaning 16x5 minutes of audio, or 80 minutes for one take. Assume 4 takes, and that's 320 minutes of record time, or about 2800 megs, for one song. I would anticipate needing to have 8-10 songs on the drive, and then burn the rest off to DAT's for mastering some other time, so that figures to around 20 gb free. That's my experience from being in real (see: records artists you've heard of) production studios more than a few times.
    • And that is assuming you have the instruments and instrument effects on a single channel per instrument, and vocals and vocal effects on a single channel per mic. Some studios prefer to split them into a pre effect channel for each instrument/mic, and a post effect channel, to record an unplugged or pure take, along with an effected take. That also assumes a basic drum mic set, and no stereo inputs.

      The space required always seems insufficient when recording more than a single song, so we move each song to

  • Linux (Score:2, Interesting)

    by MandoSKippy ( 708601 )
    Projects like this really stress the usefulness of Linux. Professional sound products that can cost HUDNREDS of dollars (and still be difficult to use and hard to understand) need the competition from projects like this. As a weekend warrior musicians and full time geek during the week projects like this speak to all my interests. Linux offers a wonderful alternative and can fill the niche VERY nicely. Not to mention the ability to add on more as you see fit. This is good for linux, good for musicians, an

    • Re:Linux (Score:3, Funny)

      by PCM2 ( 4486 )
      Professional sound products that can cost HUDNREDS of dollars (and still be difficult to use and hard to understand) need the competition from projects like this.
      Yeah, wow, whole hundreds of dollars ... and have you seen the cost of guitar picks lately? It's outrageous! Too bad Linux can't do anything about that, though.
    • Personally, unfortunately, I think that audio work on Linux, especially a bit more serious software, simply isn't 'there' yet. I've tried many audio editors on Linux.

      My experience is as follows: some have big trouble compiling (ardour), there are many packages that restrict themselves to the most basic functionality (for denoising I usually have to resort to gwc, equalizing is nearly impossible without realtime preview), and I've seen many many crashes and strange behaviour (audacity: left button for zoom

  • Interesting But (Score:3, Interesting)

    by blackmonday ( 607916 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @02:50PM (#9318267) Homepage
    This is a pretty cool hobby project and you could get some work done - but there's a reason I use Cubase SX on Windows 2000 and on my Powerbook - It gets the job done reliably, every time. I record 3-4 tracks at once with an external box connected through USB or firewire on the PB, then switch to Windows for the heavier processing (rams cheaper on the PC).

    Still I don't knock the Linux / OSS apps, last time I posted about Audacity I got a great response from the lead developer. Keep up the good work and someday maybe I'll trade in to a Linux solution. But I'm just not quite ready yet!

  • Remote boot also reduces noise (Score:3, Interesting)

    by willy_me ( 212994 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @02:52PM (#9318291)
    And offers far more storage potential. It's also cheaper then flash. And with the dropping price of gig ethernet, performance really shouldn't be an issue. Of course, it requires a server, but then most people wanting a quiet PC for recording will most likely have another desktop PC with more storage.
    • I've run my desktop at work as an X terminal to one of our rackmounts in the datacenter for months. 100 Mbit switched ethernet over a busy network, and through the busiest switch on the network.

      No problems to report. That remote desktop rig is more reliable than the copy of the OS sitting on that particular hard drive. (The curse of the admin's desktop.)

  • Hard Drive Clatter Isn't Only Issue (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Glitch010101 ( 202423 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @02:58PM (#9318357) Homepage
    I've got one of the Via EPIA Mini-ITX machines, and I can tell you from experience that although there's less moving parts, that doesn't mean it's quiet.

    Noisy capacitors, often talked about as a source of insecurity (you can listen to them with a computer and "hear" the data going across), but they also emit an annoying, high-pitched squeak which varies up and down.

    If you're looking for a dedicated recording system, the Via boards may not be for you! Mine is noisy enough that I'm considering hiding it (it's my mythTV box) in a cabinet! And it's got no fans!

    • those are inductors (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Capacitors are silent. Inductors store energy magnetically and thus create magnetic fields. The magnetic fields cause the inductor windings to shift slightly. In a switching power supply the windings are charged and discharged over and over. This makes a tone. As the load on the power supply changes the frequency can change. Thus you get the up and down slide chirps.

  • Hard Drive noise?! Whatever. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AsnFkr ( 545033 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @03:04PM (#9318416) Homepage Journal
    These people are nuts. IF you have the PC in the same room as the MIC's you don't have high enough quality MIC's for the PC noise to make a difference, and if you do have MIC's that are picking up HARDDRIVE noise you need to build yourself a control room for the PC to sit in. I have a one room studio right now, and I get amazing quality with $200 of mics and a Duron 1200 based system running Cool Edit Pro and a soundblaster live. Go listen to what I've recorded - here [atomicraygunattack.com] (Download 'Bessy the Cheeseburger' or 'Justic Le Pig'..they are the cleanest things we have up.) These are currently just rough mixes and not mastered. Thats comming when we are done tracking. Anyways, tell me you can hear the harddrive in those recordings. Yea right. The computer is sitting RIGHT NEXT to the mics. For gods sake, my power supply fan is louder than the harddisk.

    The other problem I see with this setup is it has no multitracking ability. I have just recently added a echo Layla sound card to my setup and can track up to 8 channels at one time. It's amazingly awesome. If you are going to spend all that money on recording gear...get a Echo Layla. It's worth it.

    I'm also about to build another room onto my house so I can have a control room...not for silencing my PC, but for convenience of being able to mix a drumset on the fly. Anyways, this is just silly.
    • There seems to be some confusion as to what kind of noise the author is talking about. I got the impression that he is refering to EM noise effecting the audio card. As any audiophile will point out, internal sound cards pick up a lot of noise from the inside of a computer. I don't think removing the harddrive helps much, but perhaps the author thinks otherwise.
  • you could do it like the pros do and have nothing but microphone cables coming through the WALL between the computer booth and the recording room.
  • This is a pretty far fetched use for bootable compact flash devices.

    A more convincing one would be a ruggedized platform for robotics development. I can't imagine a hard drive taking a whole lot of abuse from a robot bouncing up and down stairs, rolling over a rocky terrain, or playing demolition derby with another robot.

    Yes, in an ideal world you would pre-load the OS into ram and keep it there. But if your robot needs to reboot, the brain case momentarily looses power, or you need to load an extra pro

    • I can't imagine a hard drive taking a whole lot of abuse from a robot bouncing up and down stairs, rolling over a rocky terrain, or playing demolition derby with another robot.

      It's actually fairly easy to shock-mount a hard drive. 2.5" drives are very light and small, and can handle plenty of bouncing around, as long as you can absorb the direct impact shocks externally.
  • With RAM prices being as low as they are nowadays (well relatively speaking anyway). I don't see why you don't record to a RAM drive. 44.000MHz 16-bit 74 minutes is 700 MB. And since I'm able to lossless compress A/V on the fly when I'm digitizing, I don't see why this would not be possible for audio. I assume you do 48Mhz recording, multi-channel but with a good compression algorithm and a few Gigs of RAM, you should be able to record for a few hours.

    After that, dump to remote network file server, or loca
    • > I assume you do 48Mhz

      I hate to nit-pick, and I assume this was just a typo, but anyone who does 48Mhz recording is insane. 48Khz is more like it.

      However, I'm not averse to recording at somewhat higher rates; just not 1000 times what's necessary.

  • What I don't get is why the Epia MII-12000, which has a fan, and not one of the fanless ones? [mini-itx.com]

    As others have mentioned, it's probably a lot more practical to put a big semi-quiet PC in the next room, but if you're going so far as to go diskless for the project, it seems a bit ridiculous to have a fan on the MB.
    • What I don't get is why the Epia MII-12000, which has a fan, and not one of the fanless ones?

      If you don't push the CPU too far, you can even run the faster VIAs fanless. If the power supply or something else blows a bit of air around the CPU cooler, it won't even get warm.

      BTW if you want to save some money, use a USB stick instead of the CF card and IDE adaptor. USB (even 2.0) sticks are a bit slower than CF cards, but not significantly since the flash memory remains the bottleneck. Needing more speed,

  • A lot of people seem to be missing something, here. Like a Live CD, this system runs on a ramdisk, not on the CF card. With 512MB of RAM, you get about 300MB of free space, which is okay for recording a song or two at a time, even ones with a bunch of tracks. You only write the keepers onto the CF card.

    The CF card will support 100,000 writes, and includes wear-leveling features that use the whole card, not just certain spots. So, realistically, I figure my musical inspiration will wear out long before the
  • duh. get a real computer and use a KVM extender. also, doesn't look like they even had ardour on there. how can anyone expect to do recording with that puny amount of storage and no ardour?

  • Studio? I think they do not get the point... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by NeedleSurfer ( 768029 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @06:17PM (#9320456)
    I am a professionnal audio technician (in Quebec you cannot say engineer...), I have been since the past 7 years. I've worked in post-prod, I've been a technical supervisor and teacher for a sound design school, I've been working in AV for the past 4 years and I am an audio consultant for musicians and project studios and home studios. I have been formely trained in audio and have been trained by my present employer in broadcast video. I have helped conceived and built 2 commercial grade studios (heh, you never do those alone...). All of that crap to say: I know my trade and I have the experience to assess of what follows;

    Studio owner, studio technicians, studio operators, studio people, they don't want a studio in a box, mixing with a mouse sucks anyway. There are of course control surfaces that exist to aleviate this problem but, as any pro audio person will tell you, you do not want only one source of processing in your studio you want as many colors as you whish, as many mics model as you can so as to capture your sound and enhance or atenuate certain aspects of it. You want knobs and faders to access as rapidly as possible what you need, you want to control your fades so they fit right in the mix, you do not want to draw them. And I say that as a digital audio and hybrid studio oriented audio tech. As much of a (not) novelty this thing is it only remains a curiosity, plus I doubt many control surfaces actually work on Linux, not many AD/DAs must be either. And to be honest, appart from the fact that mini-ITX machines are usually pretty silent, what's the purpose of small here? The smaller the box the more interferences you will have in your signal, don't forget that part of a digital audio circuit is actually analog and subject to all the garbage found inside a computer box. Even if you use external boxes for your connectors you won't be protected against the added heavy jitter and granulation noise brought by those interferences. Of course you could use a very well shielded card, but will a shielded card fit inside those tiny boxes?

    And how much more of your money are you willing to invest in harware and time to not pay for your OS...

    Anyways, you get the idea. Long live audio on Linux, I am really looking forward to seeing good solutions appearing on this system but this isn't one of them. I see Linux in audio as an embeded OS for external processors, I see it at the hearth of studio-in-a-box (not the computer form factor but the mixing consolle/recorder form factor) machines, various crazy and imaginative audio appliances but not as a general purpose OS used for audio.

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