Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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?
Although they do redirect you to a page about software patents in Europe if you don't click though in 15 seconds.
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.
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.
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 |
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!
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.
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 real "pro" would have a good soundcard, with a digital input/output. He/she would then use an external DAC/ADC to get sounds in and out of the computer without (as much) fear of interference.
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
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Software patents couldn't shut the website down. It took slashdot to do that.
And use the EigerStein router on a floppy: http://lrp.steinkuehler.net/DiskImages/Eiger/Eiger Stein.htm
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 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...)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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)
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.
The SBLive and other consumer cards don't have good A/D converters. You can spend thousands on a good one. However, the Delta line of interfaces from m-audio have a good reputation for low-end DAWs.
:)
If you've already got a capable computer system, look at a Delta 44 and Cakewalk Home Studio 2004 (or Sonar 3, if you have the money). It would be much cheaper than a comparable analog system. Be careful, though - home studios are a big money pit.
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.
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.