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Solid-State Mini-ITX Linux Recording Studio HOWTO
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."
Agnula states its closed due to software patent issues.
:(
This will probably hinder any efforts in making this work for me.....which really sucks, as I was looking for a good Linux-based studio system
I'm sure other people here can make recommendations
Dont flash cards have a maximum number of write operations? Or is that USB keys?
paul reinheimer
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.
Thank god for this. Hard drive chatter totally ruined the last Bizkit album.
Buy a nice shiny Dual G5, stick it in your hallway.
And then buy a couple of 15 feet USB/Firewire cables to extend your keyboard, mouse, and external soundcards into your sound proof recording room.
Voila!
I wish they'd waited on the Delta 44. Going with the SB Live! makes this useless.
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.
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.
Evolution or ID?
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.
whoooo!
:?
but in all seriousness how much noise is there really from modern HDD's? not enough to make a diffrence i think but i am not an audio engineer so...
It sounds lovely having a completely solid state system, but with a Flash lifetime of only 100,000 writes, how long will it last?
When you factor in the fact that recording music at any decent quality takes a LOT of disk space, you're going to be doing an awful lot of rewriting.
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.
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.
Please help metamoderate.
Clicking on the "to enter the site click here" link, we find that the site (and the project) is up and running just fine.
... assuming the West doesn't just bully the Chinese and the Indians into adopting similiar measures and crippling their own tech industries as well.
Software patents will either be recinded, or software development will come to a screeching halt and ALL free software will be killed, not just this project.
In which case we can all just pack up and find another profession, or move somewhere other than the US and the EU (if current legislative trends continue). After the IT economy has been destroyed and innovation has moved to India and China, perhaps the US (and possibly EU) beurocrats and politicians will get their heads out of their asses and ban software patents
I am quite frankly amazed at the EU's stupidity in this, as it clearly benefits Microsoft and other big American firms, to the detriment of European startups such as Suse, Mandrake, et. al. But that is neither here nor there.
I will continue to develop and use free software (including this project) until such a time as $un, Micro$oft, or one of their stooges ($CO) kills free software dead, or reform occurs.
At which point I will continue to use and develop free software, until such a time as their thugs pry my keyboard from my cold, dead fingers...but that is a rant for another day.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
as reported on ./ get a solid state hard drive. they are pricy now but will probubally be less expensive before this linux system is all together, smooth and getting popular.
One of these with your G5 and your set to go.
Evolution or ID?
A interesting project, but 2GB is just not enough for most audio production needs. My father is in the audio production industry and uses a computer do most of his production. He would probably run out of space after 20 minutes of mixing.
I like the idea of using Linux for the software, but I would go with a sound deadening case like the "Acousticase" and use the traditional hard drive solution for storage.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Now all I need is musical talent. :p
I thought it was funny.
Yeah, a G5 sure is a "silent PC" if you run 15 foot cords to kb/monitor/mouse and put them in a soundproof room.
But, interesting is right out.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
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.
Given the finite amount of write-cycles on CF media I think it'd be much more sensible to have the data written to an NFS-mounted partition on a fast (and noisy) remote host. Put GBit cards in both machines and performance should also be way better. The system partitions can stay on CF since they don't get written too that often (i.e. only during upgrades).
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.
The fans of a computer make far more noise than the HD. But that's not even the point. More "noise" happens when the signals are going into the soundcard itself inside of a case full of electromagnetic waves bouncing off of everything. Who records where a live mic could pick up the computer? Isn't this supposed to be "pro?"
...
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 provides. And they should be pretty cheap these days.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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.
stuff |
you have a "dedicated" machine room, who cares how much noise the computer makes, its in the other room !
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, and good for the masses (in that it will be easier to produce quality music that doesn't need the big labels to be able to afford hte software.)
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!
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.
...what's the point when there aren't any decent hard drive based recording applications out there? The ones that do exist aren't even past beta and achieve the feature set of something like Cakewalk 2.0 from the early 90s. Not to mention DXi and VST support.
"Sufferin' succotash."
it's what most studios do atm.
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!
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.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
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.
Evolution or ID?
jffs2 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.
The Raven
No matter which device you use, you should be encoding to flac/ogg/(even mp3) on the fly. I created a linux-based computer to record sound a the church I attend. It is quite advanced, encoding church services to ogg files and allowing for "full-duplex" recording of music. Vocals and instruments can be recorded seperately as two seperate, stereo tracks for a final 4-track master. Many sound cards allow for playback and recording of 2 channels each of full PCM data. We use the cheap C-Media based sound cards, specifically the CMI8738. These cards can be found on ebay and in stores marketed as Mad Dog or Inland for as little as $10 and are the best ones we've used -- comparable to high end creative cards at a small fraction of the price. They also have excellent sound quality and full duplex recording ability -- from both analog and/or SPDIF/digital inputs. A 400mhz Pentium II is plenty to do the recording and vorbis/flac encoding and decoding on the fly. It reduces the file size substantially (1/2 for flac, 1/4 for quality 8 vorbis) while maintaining very low latency. The process doing the actual capture is (un?)niced to a very low number.
However, keep in mind that the CMI8738 soundcard has some bugs in the drivers. The major bug of a clipped buffer can be solved by using the card in full duplex mode at least once. The easiest way to do this is to cat the sound device back to the sound device. I also made a low level hack to disable the line-in loopback during full duplex recording, which is handy for letting the vocalists hear only the instruments and theirself/key vocals patched in through the sound board in their monitors/earphones. If you want me to send you the source contact me at slashdotzzxc@yahoo.com
An older power supply, sufficient for that pentium system (hell a 486 with a math co proc is enough) probably wont even need a fan.
As for the price, there's a shop up the road with a crate full of pentium mobos with chips and RAM for a buck a piece (untested, but so far I'm 3 for 3 grabbing working ones).
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
i picked this up a few months ago. yes, compact flash is limited, but if you are a hobbyist, it is plenty for doing a few songs. then you just transfer the 16-bit 44.1MHz wav files to your PC, and use your favorite tool for whatever you need. i'm sure you can get more writes onto a card than a DAT, and the media price isn't that bad. the sound quality is great, esp considering the price.
x MR8.htm
here's a review i found trying to locate the exact model number:
http://www.acousticfingerstyle.com/Foste
i paid less than $300 and got a 128MB card, headphones, and a mic with it. great for any home/demo recording.
n8 (too busy/lazy to register for account right now)
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 (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.
adventure-today.com
Has anyone used this distro or linux music software in general. Ive been toying with the idea of dual booting for a while now but was worried about the state of linux music software.
Any of you guys know if there are linux alternatives of the following software which i cant do without but also more importantly how they compare.
Cooledit Cubase Buzz
Im more concerned about the audio side than midi since i record everything live but its always nice to have the have the option to add a little strings or whatever for colour.
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this post is too small to contain.
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.
Do not sell one of these to this man
Okay, kids, I'm an audio engineer with a SMALL home studio. And by SMALL, I mean 100GB of storage. If you're recording at a decent bit depth and a decent sample rate, a single multiple-track song is going to eat that 2GB up right there. Hell, even at shitty rates (16bit/44.1kHz--customer requested it, don't blame me), a 40-minute radio drama that never went over 4 tracks was taking up 16GB of space on my hard disk.
This system is a total joke, and, just as many have already pointed out, hard drive noise is hardly the main concern in most studios. If it's even noticeable on the track, it's easy enough just to filter it out.
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 program it would be nice to have a storage system along for the ride.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I tried setting this up before, but i couldn't get the tracks to sync up. Is there a specific sound card that's needed for this?
Last time I checked there weren't any professional level (cubase, sonar, logic, motu, etc.. .) sequencing/recording/arranging packages available on Linux. :(
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I don't really understand the design choices made by the author..
Why solid state? You have to put the audio data somewhere... It's certainly not going to fit on the CF.
Who cares about HD "chatter"/RF when you have a mobo emitting all the RF you could ever want? A/D conversion should be done outside of the PC so that RF is a non-issue.
Can someone just make this system cost $150 or less so that I can use this a portable high quality recorder with an exteranl microphone?
And use the EigerStein router on a floppy: http://lrp.steinkuehler.net/DiskImages/Eiger/Eiger Stein.htm
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 local harddisk (after spinning it up, or plugging in a removable HDD)
Should be cheap enough
This excellent round-up of Linux digital audio software (including low-latency kernels) is a one-stop shop for all your recording needs: http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/
I am 2 for 3 on getting free systems when they are cleaning out IT closets here at work. One working one became my firewall/router, one non-working one was scavenged for parts (screws, leds, etc) and the other one was a working Compaq dual-Pentium server with 3 ultra-wide 4GB SCSI drives. That thing weighed about 80 lbs, and had a huge redundant power supply. So what did I do? Gutted it, and built a regular machine in it. It is quiet (steel) and cool (volume). The hard drives fit right into the SCSI trays. It is a monster.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Anyone who needs a 'silent' audio workstation for A/D recording it going to need gobs of persistent I/O and a heavy duty CPU.
Almost all digital recordings of value are done at 24bit/96Khz (usually stored as 32bit FP), which when recorded in stereo is ~ 1MB / second of just WRITE activity.
This doesn't even begin to factor in playback of existing tracks. I have yet to record anything useful that wasn't comprised 6-8 independent tracks. Assuming the same bitrate, in stereo, that is about 3-4 MB of constant, random access read activity.
Given the lack of RAM (512MB for those that didn't read the article), you can at best hope to cache about 90 seconds of music in RAM. No, I didn't figure in OS overhead (??? oh yeah, this is linux.. there is none).
Ok, next.. Audio mixing and digital effects. Throw in a compressor and software reverb/delay and that 'lil via CPU is hosed. God help you if you try to apply different effects to different tracks.
Lets also assume that you don't own a drum kit, keyboard, trumpet, etc. You will need software instruments, which are totally waveform driven, typically by the host CPU. The SB Live! has soundbank instruments, which are *very* good, but the author also stated that he was waiting for a delta 44, which AFAIK, does not support onboard soundbanks/instruments.
So, in a nutshell, you have a severely limited I/O bottlneck, a severely limited CPU and massive memory limimtations.
All to have a 'silent audio workstation'?
Bottom Line: If silent recording is so important (ie. CD quality mixing/overdubs/dynamic range), you will find this setup unusable.
Speed's less of an issue than you'd think with CF, at least if you're doing FLAC or other compression - Uncompressed stereo 1xCDROM is about 150KB/sec, and small cheap CF seems to mostly be 8X write speed, and high-end camera large CFs seems to be 32X, so that's lots of tracks. If you're desperate, and using CF-to-IDE interfaces like this system, you could even do RAID on your CFs :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
What I don't get is why the Epia MII-12000, which has a fan, and not one of the fanless ones?
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.
This Like That - fun with words!
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 surprised if they had a really quality-grade chip in there.
That said, I haven't used it so I have no actual experience with this. Has anybody recorded music via this input and can comment on its quality?
I know that there are external 'boxes' that most likely have a kickass AD converter in them, and send the digital data via USB or something similar. Anybody used any of these types of things and can comment on how good they sound?
I'm currently looking to set up a small studio to record some musical ideas bouncing around in my head. I was thinking of doing it analog, just for simplicity and coolness. but if digital wouldn't be that much more expensive, I might go for this option instead.
make world, not war
Sorry to say, but as a musician, I still keep my XP partition just for music production.
The real trouble is lack of serious recording software for linux. I've tried Ardour, it looked like it could be usable in a couple of years, but right now the interface is terrible, and the program itself crashes a lot. and it looks like the most advanced recording software i could find.
I really want to record on Free Software, but currently it's not possible. And I'm not a good enough programmer to change that. So i stick with proprietary recording software.
HD noise is the least of my problems. I record accoustic guitars and vocals in the same room my computer is in, and with smart mic placement and compression, you can get excellent results (of course, a decent mic and sound card are needed, as well). The advantage of recording your stuff at home with no time pressure more than compensates for the slight fan noise.
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 CF would fail. Like, LONG before.
Also, the hard drive chatter comes from RF interference inside the case produced by the rotating magnetic disk and the electricity in the cable -- not the actual sound of the hard drive. --Henry K. (article author)
The whirring hard drive should not be an issue.
Setup a wall with plexiglass in between your computer and the studio. Run cables over-head, or drill holes.
I've used a similar setup, and it works fine, even with mics that pick up almost everything.
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.
The Live pretty much sucks for anything other than gaming.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As an electric guitar player with a home studio my problem has always not been hard drive noise (buried, because a lot of us like to record loud -a nice cranked vacuum tube amp, also, there are other reasons for doing this, the louder you turn things up to a point, it seems the more sound of the room the amp is in you get), but more RF interference from things like monitors and power supplies.
I always had to stand at a 90 degree angle to my system, that cuts hum from RF down to almost inaudible a lot of the time.
A fix for this? "Humbucking" pickups (2 coils out of phase with each other). However, humbuckers sound much different from "single coils".
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?
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
Somehow I fail to see how putting stuff into Compact Flash is somehow novel or newsworthy. CF can be used as a normal (if somewhat slow and with limited write cycles) hard drive regardless of the operating system or purpose. Industrial CF models can even be used in applications where reasonably low cost and resistance to vibration/shocks are important as long as the limited write cycle factor is taken into account when planning system swap usage etc..
/. main page in 2004 only indicates that /. editors are happy posting news about linux tweaks regardless of the real value of these news.
Personally I've installed several flavors of Windows on CF's of different sizes . For example it is quite easy to run Win98 from a read-only CF using a ramdrive as the drive for the OS. The instructions for this can be found with some googling, and this idea has really been around for quite a while.
Overall my point is that there is nothing special in using a CF if it suits your needs. Having a how-to on how to do this on
Now mod me whereever for saying this.
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 than that of the Santa Cruz, but it's not substantial enough to warrant the shear lack of features that you'll get with using the Envy chips on Linux.
/ ca talina/comparisons.asp
I've also noticed that Turtle Beach now makes a card called the "Catalina", which looks like standard Envy 24 HT-S fare. How disappointing. I've never been a Creative Labs fan, but they appear to make one of the only new chipsets anymore with halfway decent Linux support. Audigy 2 is technically inferior to the M-Audio Delta hardware (in terms of recording capabilities, like true 24/96 support), but it's superior in a sense that its hardware actually works very well. You can't say that for any of the Envy 24 lineup, especially the low-end Envy 24 HT models.
Man... I'm sorely disappointed at the state of PC Audio. It's actually *regressed* in the past few years. Companies think that it's enough to simply add a few extra speaker channels and tout 96 KHz SPDIF output, but it ISN'T enough. Look at this comparison:
http://turtlebeach.com/site/products/soundcards
Sure, the M-Audio Delta hardware is more advanced than Catalina (especially with the more sophisticated Envy 24 chip), but the fact that it has a million XLR jacks and 24/96KHz doesn't change the fact that the Envy DSPs are near-useless junk on Linux. Besides... Most home users are going to introduce more noise anyway, through their cheapo mics and mixing boards, than any of these soundcards produce, and then they're going to master CDs at 44 KHz. Anyone else that needs to do serious audio work, beyond what I mentioned, probably won't use Linux anyway.
I'll probably stick with my Santa Cruz until someone starts making decent DSPs (with balls) again. UNCreative is probably the only future option that even comes close.
The mini-itx motherboards from lex.com.tw have a compact flash slot in the motherboard. Put a micro hard drive (memorysuppliers.com) in there. If you decide to do this, reply to this message and I'll give you contact info for getting a bootable image (Debian).
I am using a 340MB MicroDrive that I got cheaply from a listing pointed to by slickdeals. I am using it with a IDE->CF adapter that I got off eBay. It works like a regular drive, but spins up very quickly (loads faster than laptop drives) and spins down after 5 seconds of usage, regardless of the power saving setting. So, I don't have to worry about wear leveling. Noise only happens when the disk is being used when some log is written to. No DMA (which can be a little troublesome to avoid due to some kernel distributions setting the use-DMA-by-default-for-IDE, but it's as fast as a hard disk and better for the purpose as a fixed storage device.
/home, /etc, and /var is in a 512MB tmpfs partition, which gets created by an tar -xzf from a no-emulation CD-ROM boot. The machine is a VIA EPIA 800 with 1.0 GB memory.)
(Everything under / except the volatile stuff in
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.
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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Looks like a nice card.
Should I be worried about the fact that the manufacturer apparently can't count? Maybe I'm posting too late, but does that connector look like it's a 15-pin to you?
Whoever designed level 61 in Frozen Bubble is a sadistic bastard.
Another interesting but pointless exercise. If you want a solid state recording device that is useful, check out Radar24 with the flash disk option http://www.izcorp.com Also be prepared to part with multiple thousands of dollars.
:)
Personally, I won't be selling my Protools HD system for a linux based system just yet
How, pray tell, is a 5db fan going to be recorded over 100db drums using overhead mics?
How is the signal getting on the drive if the music is being plugged directly into the studio machine?
I think this is a neat toy and I'll probably try one, but the noise issue is a non-starter.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
...might as well toss my plug in too. This is prerelease, but I've already mixed-down/mastered a live CD with it.
t op ic=22051&
http://209.152.181.168/~hydrogen/index.php?show
Monty
As much as I'm a die-hard Linux fan, there's no way I'd consider ditching Windows for recording my music. It's all about the software, and Linux just isn't there. Even if there were a reasonable and easy-to-use multitracker, all of the pro effects are for Win/Mac.
And don't even get me started the absurdity of using tiny 2G memory sticks to record on, and doing it to solve a problem that doesn't exist (hard drive noise). I record a lot of acoustic stuff with very expensive mics and preamps in the same room as my computers, and I don't even bother shutting down my Linux box when I record. It's just not loud enough to worry about if you're set up a few feet away.
Josh Woodward
Well yes, seeing as 44kHz is the standard for CDs (ie, redbook audio). Do your recording and mixing at 24-bit/96kHz, but if you want to sell a CD, you have little choice.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Whilst googling for another place to download the ISO (I'm late to the party and the agnula.org site is smoldering), I found this mailing list announcement that mentions their French Mirror, graciously hosted by IRCAM:
. 1.1/demudi-live-cd_1.1.1.iso
http://freesoftware.ircam.fr/mirrors/agnula/1.1/1
Now that my download is almost complete, I feel I can share the love.
100Mbps would have to do, or he's gotta choose a new mobo.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
On apt.agnula.org there is a mirror advice that reads:
a gnula-is o/ (CCRMA, Stanford)
p t/ unstable main contribp t/ unstable main contrib
/etc/apt/sources.list if you want to use `apt-get' to download and install AGNULA/DeMuDi packages on your system.
:)
Following the publication on Slashdot of an article by Linux Devices ("Building a solid-state mini-ITX Linux recording studio") the AGNULA server at KTH has been slashdotted. Until the storm passes by, we WARMLY invite people to use our mirrors to donwload the AGNULA/DeMuDi ISOs and to access the APT repository.
Please use:
http://freesoftware.ircam.fr/mirrors/agnula/ (IRCAM, Paris)
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/mirrors/agnula/
to download the AGNULA/DeMuDi ISO images, and put
deb http://freesoftware.ircam.fr/mirrors/demudi/ unstable main contrib
deb-src http://freesoftware.ircam.fr/mirrors/demudi/ unstable main contrib
and/or
deb http://ccrma.stanford.edu/mirrors/agnula/demudi-a
deb-src http://ccrma.stanford.edu/mirrors/agnula/demudi-a
in your
We are sorry for the lack of clarity - we were in the process of redesigning the web site and clearly show the existence of the (kindly provided) mirrors, when the Slashdot storm caught us!
The AGNULA team would like to deeply thank IRCAM and Stanford for providing storage and connectivity for the mirrors; and specifically Francois Dechele, Patrice Tisserand (IRCAM) and Fernando Pablo Lopez-Lezcano (CCRMA, Stanford) for taking care of all the administrative details.
Do you even know what the fuck you're talking about? Oh, I forgot, you were trolling. My bad.
who shows up and talks about how great a solid state hard drive would be in such-and-such an application. Fucking lamer...