Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] ardour & snd: the saga begins
From: Benno Senoner (sbenno_AT_gardena.net)
Date: Mon May 15 2000 - 12:26:58 EEST
On Mon, 15 May 2000, Paul Winkler wrote:
>
> Well, there is a subtle distinction. You're working from the studio
> angle; I'm dreaming from the performance angle. The one piece from
> your puzzle that obviously fits right into mine is Quasimodo. And
> the portability requirement constrains my hardware options quite a
> bit.
>
> I want a box that is sturdy and reliable enough to haul around in a
> rack with my bass amp. I don't know *what* kind of interface it
> would have! I've thought of doing it as a laptop with a USB audio /
> midi interface, but I'd rather have a rackmount... I just don't
> trust laptops that much. So then some sort of monitor & control is
> needed. You could change patches & parameters via MIDI with any one
> of those floor controllers on the market, and anything more advanced
> than that would probably require you to hook it up via ethernet to a
> laptop... Unless there's a cheap LCD monitor that's sturdy and small
> enough that I could fit it into a couple rack spaces! That would be
> ideal.
If you already own a laptop, the cheapest is to redirect the X11 display
of the audio box to the LCD of the former.
If you use a cross cable then you not even need a hub ( another $50-$100
saved :-) )
>
> If this type of system could be done well for under, say, $3,000 I
> think there would be a substantial market for it. Shhh, don't tell
> anyone. Hell, people pay that much for fancy synthesizers. As CPU
> price-per-MHZ drops, I think a system like this is inevitable. I'd
> just like it to run Linux instead of WinCE or some crap like that.
If you really want to save money you can use a dual Celeron using
an Abit mobo which has 2 celeron sockets and supports SMP.
You can get a complete system with 2 x 533 Mhz as little as $600-$700
(your foobar-highend audio cards excluded)
Add a good rackmount case and you are still below the $1000
(as for the disks if you really need huge disk space, and want to save money
you can add a bunch of Promide EIDE UDMA/66 controllers or 3WARE
4 or 8way IDE channel controller with a few
good (I'd recommend IBM) EIDE UDMA disks.
(I know Paul hates them, but the price/performance is simply unbeatable)
(I guy on the linux-raid list achieved about 80-90MB/sec using
soft-RAID0 + 3WARE IDE controller plus 7200rpm EIDE drives
_NOT_ that bad eh ? :-)
>
> One thing I just thought of: Commercial FX boxes don't have to run
> fsck every time a drunk guy trips over the power cord. I guess
> there's nothing to be done but add a UPS to the requirements for my
> system...
Ever heard about journaled FS ?
ReiserFS is really stable and performant, and the next(current?) Suse
will let you install Linux onto reiserFS directly from the installer into
your root partition.
For example I use reiserFS for my old P133 which acts as internet gateway,
I happily power-cycle all the time, the recover time is a few secs.
(remove the startup of all service in the initscripts, and you get a box which
boots in 30-50 secs.
Benno.
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