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This would be very nice for dedicated machines that use hard drives...

Standalone Digital Audio Workstations:

• Tascam 788 PortaStudio
• Korg D1600
• Fostex VF-16 Ministudio

MP3 Players:

• Portables
• Auto

These sort of things get knocked around alot. And durability/reliability are doubly important for the multitrack machines. Be a shame to lose a great recording session, just cuz the drummer loses a stick and it whacks the unit halfway across the table.

(Yeah, a screwy example, but you get the point...)

"This seems like an expensive and inefficient solution for the problem you describe. PCs are actually pretty bad at doing signal processing; there's a whole class of chips (DSPs) that are optimized for it. There are almost certainly DSP-based hardware boards/widgets that will handle a lot of these effects for you, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that there was a general-purpose programmable DSP card on the market too. Researching this before you spend money on a cluster would be a Good Idea."


Yup. Here's some links:
Symbolic Sounds Kyma system, a DSP-based programmable hardware solution for audio.
Details on the Kyma system (drool!):
http://namm.harmony-central.com/SNAMM00/Content/Sy mbolic_Sound/PR/Kyma5.html

Hardware DSP hacking tools:
Analog Devices EZ-SHARC/EZ-KIT DSP experimentation board (which screams for Linux support, incidentally)

See here for my earlier comment/response.

Some links to mLAN resources, by no means complete, please follow-up with more URL's if you find them (I don't have time):

Pavo (leader in 3rd party mLAN development): http://www.pavo.com/

Yamaha's mLAN (pretty pictures): http://www.harmony-central.com/Newp/2000/mLAN.html

Details on mLAN products (Japanese) http://www.miroc.co.jp/Tango/qrys/NEWS/yamaha/mlan .html

mLAN stands for "musical LAN", which is exactly what it sounds like. There is no point us re-engineering this for Linux, we simply need to work on making Linux a good platform for mLAN development, and we'll get to the point where we can route audio just like we route IP, and thus do things to it just like we do with the content fields of IP packets...

If you want realtime DSP-rendering farms based on Linux, then keep an eye on the work being done to add Firewire/IEEE1394 support to the Kernel. This is where it will start.

-- Jay Vaughan - jv@teklab.com

Or perhaps maybe see if there are some DSP cards that would work with the VST plugins your using. I think farming it out in real time is not something thats going to happen for a while. I mean, the latency will definately be a problem....

Harmony Central had an article (old, but still interesting), about a DSP card. And here is some info on a yamaha DSP Farm.

I think going that route would be better....
--

Or perhaps maybe see if there are some DSP cards that would work with the VST plugins your using. I think farming it out in real time is not something thats going to happen for a while. I mean, the latency will definately be a problem....

Harmony Central had an article (old, but still interesting), about a DSP card. And here is some info on a yamaha DSP Farm.

I think going that route would be better....
--

"I would prefer to pay more than a $1 in royalties to an artist out of the $16 cost of a CD."

I am so sick of this argument. Does this mean you can go to the local BurgerWop and steal a few burgers, but tip the underpaid frontline staff a few bucks. These poor underpaid artists are there because they signed contracts and wanted the marketting and distribution given by these bastard RIAA companies. See Harmony Central for an insiders view on why traditional RIAA approaches are good for quite a bit of artists.

clif

idunno. I think what's interesting about the OLGA isn't necessarily the precedent it sets, but the model it should be seen as.

Get this, harmony central has quite a large database of tabs from the OLGA. They've managed to stay open for business throughout this mess. What's that mean? This kind of information can't be shut down - and those that try only make themselves look foolish. Unfortunate as it is, there will always be victories for those who feel that everything should be bought and sold at the prices they themselves have set. But those victories are becoming fewer and farther between....I have to say that I look at the good side of the OLGA. Even though it's a shadow of its former self at harmony-central. It's still there. And IMNSHO, we've only seen the tip of the iceberg (metaphor, titanic, etc.)


FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network

First off, you can build your own midi interface for the palm for less than $10. Do a search on the web and you should be able to find it.

Secondly, I'd like to hear this next to the Roland PMA-5, a hand-held device that provides a 18 note polyphony and effects, which now goes for $300 dollars new. It isn't much bigger, but provides more features. (and also guzzles your battery pretty quickly)
PMA-5 review

Ok, those issues aside, I'm glad to see people making music on their palm. I'm hoping somebody comes out with some handspring modules that do similar things too, and I've also seen some cool synth programs written for gameboy.

Terratec CD/MP3 Player

Mambox portable MP3/CD Player

Pine Technology (MP3 Audio): D'music SM-200C Portable MP3/Audio CD Player

netDrives CD/MP3 player Brujo

MIDI is a standard for mimicking instruments

No, MIDI is not a standard for mimicking instruments. It's a communication standard for controlling Musical Instruments using a Digital Interface. If you look at MIDI messages, they are almost all of the "turn this note on", "turn this note off", "turn the volume up" and "use this patch" variety. (BTW: here, the term patch refers to a set of parameters that make up a sythesised sound, kinda like a sample, but not really.) There are a few uses of MIDI to dump samples and sysex data, but MIDI is kinda slow for that so most people use disks or SCSI interfaces.

For more information, check out http://www.harmony-central.com/MIDI/Doc/doc.html .

And even _if_ AMD 450 would run SMP, the Celeron
seems to be a better choice because of its much
faster floating point unit (see benchmarks here).

I had no problems reading the article, mind you I am in the lab so somebody else may have signed up and I am lucky enough to still have a cookie..
OLGA is still out there, check Harmony Central
but reading through the article it sounded like the biggest argument against OLGA was that they had lyrics on the site, so once they have all the lyrics on lyrics.ch or where ever OLGA should be able to put up the tabs and link to the lyrics..