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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."
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
you have a "dedicated" machine room, who cares how much noise the computer makes, its in the other room !
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.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I'm not trying to belittle the accomplishment at all, but IMHO if you get serious enough about audio recording, enough to the point that you're worried about such things as noise from the hard drives interfering with your sound quality, you're probably going to
A) Not be using Linux-based audio recording or sequencing software
or
B) Switch to a non-PC based recording solution.
Most people who are just throwing down tracks in their bedroom are probably not yet at the point where they are tweaking the hell out of their audio to get the perfect sound, they just want to mix some stuff together.
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
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That depends, he talks about getting a max r/w speed of 7MB/s. On a congested 100base network performance can go lower than that, using GBit devices (which these days don't cost significantly more) you're almost guaranteed a better throughput. Also don't forget the overhead NFS (or any other networked file system) will incur.
10Mbit/sec will almost certainly not be enough, even if you're connecting two PC's directly to each other.
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.
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.