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Lunchbox Computers for Live Music Performances?
Dan Reetz asks: "As a PC based musician, mobility is critical. However, most laptops have horrible soundcards. PCMCIA cards like a VXPocket cost about 700 clams. A friend of mine recommended I look into 'lunchbox' style computers as a portable solution. A few searches revealed them to be quite expensive and they are hard to find used. Does anyone know of a source for used Lunchbox PC's (even just the diplay would be fine) or a better low latency/noise audio solution for laptops?"
*ducks and runs out of room*
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http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0110/05.audio. php
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The professional standard for high-resolution audio is 24-bit/96-kHz audio. Mac OS X 10.1 goes beyond this standard by managing all audio as 32-bit, floating-point data. "So your Mac not only efficiently handles today's high-resolution audio, but it's prepared for tomorrow's even higher resolution audio formats," Apple says.
Multichannel audio. The Mac operating system has historically offered two-channel stereo output only. While that may be okay for some applications, Mac OS X 10.1 is designed to handle higher-end software by delivering native multichannel audio capability scaleable to "n" channels, which enables features like 5.1 channel surround sound from your Mac. It also provides software with multichannel recording capability, which gets rid of the third-party middleware that was once needed to deliver over two channels of audio to hardware devices.
Mac OS X's HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) provides high-performance, ultra-low latency communication between apps and I/O (in/out) devices that's "measurably more efficient than in previous solutions," according to Apple. The result: there's no delay for timing sensitive audio data as it makes its way from the input device through the Mac OS X audio infrastructure to output. Apple says that Mac OS X is fast enough that musicians can play MIDI instruments through the computer in real-time. This means they could use the Mac as an effective synthesizer for live performance. Apple says "this kind of audio performance hasn't been available on any other computer platform without expensive and time-consuming system modifications" and that it "rivals the performance of specialized audio hardware."
Mac OS X also makes another break from tradition. No longer does the Mac operating system have to use third-party software to manage MIDI. Mac OS X includes MIDI services that Apple describes as "world class," providing software apps with the ability to manage MIDI and define a system wide MIDI configuration that's available to all applications. What's more, Mac OS X provides music services (the fundamental functions of MIDI sequencers, including common MIDI editing routines like cut, copy, paste and repeat) to applications.
Digital audio can also be enhanced with digital signal processing (DSP) plug-ins that process audio, such as applying reverb or distortion, and send the processed audio back through the audio system. Though DSP plug-ins for the Mac have flourished over the years, they come in a variety of formats that aren't always compatible so developers have often ended up making different versions of their plug-ins for different applications. Mac OS X is designed to make audio plug-ins more universal by offering a system-level plug-in protocol called Audio Units.
Apple says that Audio Units offer the Mac developer community a way to deliver plug-ins that will work with all the audio apps running on the Mac. Mac OS X 10.1 delivers several Audio Units, including a Velocity Engine optimized reverb and a sample rate converter.
The new audio architecture of Mac OS X will combat two problems that relate to timing, one endemic to the process of recording and the other a by-product of its new "industrial strength" OS.
A significant challenge of music recording and production is to ensure that tracks presently being recorded can be synchronized to previously recorded tracks, and also to ensure that they can be written back to disk correctly in time. (The delay between reading the previous tracks from the hard disk and routing them to the musician is called latency.)
Prior to Mac OS X, companies developed their own technologies, which included buffering, to combat latency and to allow audio tracks and MIDI channels to be routed to the artist in unison, enabling the musician to play "in sync." Digidesign's TDM (time-division multiplexing) and Steinberg's VST (Virtual Studio Technology) are two examples of this type of technology for dealing with audio. (The inclusion of folders bearing these acronyms in OS X's libraries indicates both these technologies will be accommodated in OS X.)
The preemptive multitasking and virtual memory capabilities of OS X's BSD core, where the CPU will be called upon to regulate computing time between a variety of applications and processes, would have proven too great a challenge for a third party developer to combat. (Under previous versions of Mac OS, most sequencer developers have required that virtual memory be turned off.) Moving these services inside the OS frees developers to concentrate on enhancing their interfaces and adding post-production capabilities.
And MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) timing and device control in OS X will finally move beyond the venerable OMS (Open Music System) and Mark of the Unicorn's FreeMIDI applications. The presence of Doug Wyatt (the developer of OMS) on Apple's music team shows that the company will build upon -- and presumably surpass -- the world standard in this area. The document distributed at WWDC claims that OS X will handle MIDI with a latency factor of one millisecond, almost real-time performance.
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A good vote for a Powerbook/iBook, no?
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