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MIDI Keyboard/Computer: Neko64
An anonymous reader gushes "Just got back from NAMM, and saw the coolest thing for music geeks - it's a MIDI keyboard with a dual Opterons and a 15 inch touchscreen. While other vendors crow about 5 inch screens (Now With Color!) these guys have a beautiful UI on a live performance instrument that is also awesome studio gear. 4 interchangable control surfaces, and battery backup to boot! If the power cord gets yanked out in the middle of a performance, there's plenty of time to bitch out the roadie and get it plugged in without missing a beat. These guys truly Get It."
The only problem with this kind of high-end equipment is that traditional capitalistic methods cannot bring prices down through competition.
The only North American dealer is http://www.coastrecording.com/. In Europe, your only choice is probably http://www.electricsound.com/.
That being said however, I've read some great reviews of this keyboard, and it stacks up well against the Triton and Yamaha (potential competitors) in terms of features, quality, and price.
Here's my goal for next year:
1) Buy this thing
2) Become a rockstar
3) Get tons of ass
4) ???
5) Profit!
Background: 28/M/Bi-Sexual; Owner of a Linux company; MBA Harvard 2003; B.S. Comp Sci MIT 2000
Some linux developers have developed a similar keyboard that is based on opensource software. I haven't compared specs in detail but I'm guessing the hardware is similar based on voice count.
http://www.lionstracs.com/
I'm totally linux-centric (unlike most slashdotters) so I wanted to make reference to those musicians who'd like to support *true* opensource development.
-ry
Actually you can...its just a standard PC built into the case...it runs XP behind their fancy front end.
$8500 for the top of the line (Dual 2GHz Opteron, 2GB RAM)
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http://store.openlabs.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects.ex
oh, it starts at a mere $5k
~To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. -Yann Martel
It costs between $2245 and $8445 depending on the configuration you want.
http://store.openlabs.com/
The big deal is that you don't have to have a bunch of cables running across the stage to a computer to get real time audio effects processing done on your software instruments. You also don't have to have a separate computer. All the interface nicely collected at your fingertips.
And yes, a dual opteron will get a significant load once you start to pile up your effects.
And regarding the price: A computer is much cheaper than a large rack of effect modules.
Geek rants since like... 2000 or something.
last time i checked - winxp is not a real-time os. so keyboard with spaceship control panel and pc inside can't be with "...near-zero latency even under high processor loads". and while processor is highly loaded, latency is "low" but midi in/out starts to drop notes...
This is a dual Opteron, with 350 watt power supply. They claim "quiet cooling fans," but as a practical matter, dual Opteron in a small, enclosed space will not be that quiet. For a piece of audio equipment, wouldn't it make more sense to cut back a bit on the processing power, and go for completely silent? Or alternatively, one could physically seperate the noise from the source. I don't think this would matter much on-stage with mega amplifiers, but in a recording studio, or for quieter music in a smaller environment (for use at home, etc.), do you really want the humming of a fan? Personally, I'd take a 1GHz C3 chip, running fanless, on a MicroITX motherboard probably, one of the quieter hard drives, in an acoustice enclosure. If I really need the high-end speed, I'd blow the money on making the case into a large heat sink, and use heat pipes.
how could it be 64-bit computing
Depends how you define bitness. PC data buses have been 64-bit ever since DIMMs first became popular as a RAM form factor. I'm guessing that some of the signal processing is done in IEEE double-precision floating-point, which is 64-bit. And no, pointer size isn't everything; even "16-bit" MS-DOS apps used pointers with 20 significant bits.
But yah, no fan is always better than a fan... but there are still a lot of musicians out there who see forking out for a fanless Apple to be a big (and unnecessary) expense. Again, that might be the difference between the kind of musicians we're around :-) I mostly know rock/punk guys and techno musicians.
The main issue with a synth is sample size.
A high quality sample of just a grand piano can be 128 megs right there. That is a single note.
Having a 64-bit processor means you can have several gigs of samples and not have to swap them to disk. They can all be in memory.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Apologies for linking to my own stuff, but check this out:
d =1284
http://www.sonicstate.com/news/shownews.cfm?newsi
Just editing the video for this too, so watch this space.
No Norm, those are your safety glasses; I'll wear my own thanks...
Get one of these, it is only $99. The article cites overkill. It reads like one of those fluff CNN articles "Own this new robot dog, only $1,000,000!".
I hate sigs.
PAE in Windows provides a set of APIs called AWE so PAE aware applications can use more than 4GB at a time. And of course the OS can put multiple applications in their own address space so standard 32-bit apps can all be fully memory resident even if they allocate an entire address space to themselves.
PAE generally isn't available in the retail Win2000/XP Professional. But - it's a simple request for an OEM (like the keyboard manufacturer) to enable the kernel and memory management features found in the server products for the OS they ship.
I saw it at NAMM last year, the sliders didn't move and the knobs were glued on.
... you will still have to put up with plugin management issues, the PC crashing, Windows, etc.
Hopefully this year they'll have gotten the control surface working.
Now, since I work for a prominent synthesizer manufacturer, I can't really comment on this system much more (though I would like t) except to repeat what I've already said about it, and that is that its a PC in a box
Its just that it'll all be in a nice plastic grey box. That is all.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Yes, but my point still stands -
You have to lean over it to use it, pretty much guaranteeing you back- or neck-ache!
If it's a PC in a nice grey box you want, get a Carillon (for a lot less than $8,000 I might add).