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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.
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 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?
>in just 650MB of Flash storage space that is mounted *read-only*, to maximize the life of the CF card.
Looks like they thought of that.
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?
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 |
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!
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'd guess you've not worked with serious Studio recording. 1.5 GB is nothing during a single session, during which I for one don't want any hassles trying to transfer files. Once I get the artist warmed up, I don't stop until it's right. Any break in the continuity and it's start all over time.
A single session can last from 30 minutes to several hours, during which mutliple instruments are being recorded. No compression, the lag and/or loss is intolerable on the master recording. This means fast access to the media (or good buffering), plenty of RAM, and the ability to reshoot a sequence (rewrite).
Generally, no fiddling is done during the session on the recording, just tweaking on the input chain. I personally prefer retakes as seperate files, so they can be matched better on timing. Generally, given the option, I will have a complete passage rerecorded rather than just a few notes. (No, I do not work for the RIAA labels, how'd you guess?)
The number of writes pretty much requires a highly rewritable media, and I question the slower, more limited flash usefulness in the media segment. For a boot drive, they are probably ideal, boot the studio with clean settings every time. Only problem? Linux does not have the variety of tools we use.
You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
Dont flash cards have a maximum number of write operations? Or is that USB keys?
All FLASH devices have a limited number of write cycles. Looking at the specs for a random device shows that modern devices support over 100,000 write cycles, and I think this is per sector.
A good device driver will use various techniques, such a wear leveling, to extend the life of the device.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
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. --
If you want a simple, relatively small and quiet, two channel recording rig, with equivalent sound quality to this, I highly suggest buying a fucking Minidisc or DAT deck, a decent mixer, and a couple good mics. Then you can dump it to a machine with decent editing tools later.
And the best part? It is silent.
What the hell advantage does this system have over a DAT deck and a computer with editing software worth using? None, because its a two-track system using a consumer-level sound card. Any gains you might make in reducing hard drive chatter will be totally overwhelmed by the crap quality of your A/D subsystem.
This thing is barely suitable for use as a two-track tracking machine, and there's no reason to edit on this thing as opposed to a decent PC which won't run into disk space or flash write limitations.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
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.