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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."
I wish they'd waited on the Delta 44. Going with the SB Live! makes this useless.
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.
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.
Tell me becuase I honestly don't know. How much CPU is needed for your audio needs? The reason I'm asking is it seems that a driveless computer with a low-power chip (which Linux runs on a lot) would be great for the application. The problem being that they cost as much as the very top end Intel systems, much of which due to lack of demand (economies of scale and whatnot).
A while back one could get a StrongArm in a 1U rack, but not any more. Oh well, I suppose I'm just hoping that some kind of market will precipitate such a product so that I can have one. I'd run my whole home network (save the gaming PC) on them if I could.
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?
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.
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.
Hell no need for GBit. 100mbit is still many times faster than writing to a Compact Flash.
For audio, a good full-duplex 10mbit link should do the trick.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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!
I wonder if anyone is researching special filesystems for compact flash storage. It seems to me it would be possible to design a filesystem that spreads data around the media to avoid (as much as possible) overwriting the same storage blocks.
Compact Flash is slow, on the order of 8MB/second. Swapping to CF is a Bad Idea (for many reasons).
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.
Here's a thought:
Keep an idle-quiet hard drive in the box, but don't mount it. Instead, write your raw audio data directly to the drive's device file.
There won't be any seeking, so there won't be any noise. Write raw number of bytes of the total sample to the end of the drive, so you know where your data ends and garbage begins.
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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
Of course you can get past the noisy pickup bit with a Line6 Variax. Sounds like a strat (and a Paul, and a Special, and a Martin, and a Rick, and a Tele, and banjo, and a sitar), and has an ethernet port. B/c it uses piezo-electric pickups and digital modelling, no 60 cycle hum or any other electrical interference. What could be cooler than that?
I picked up a copy of the Agnula CD at LAD this year in Karlsruhe, along with a couple other audio-specific LiveCD's (one from SUSE, and another whose name I can't remember, alas), and I have to say that they all ran pretty well.
I work for a pro audio equipment mfr. I was pretty impressed with these distro's
Definitely worth downloading and spending a few hours investigating, if you're a sound/synth geek. (I am, so consider the bias...)
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