Re: [LAU] Configuration for a FREE professionnal studio : your minds about my proposal

From: Aurelien <orl@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Thu Mar 20 2008 - 15:53:27 EET

On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 01:35:44PM +0100, Thomas Ilnseher wrote :
>
> Am Donnerstag, den 20.03.2008, 09:52 +0100 schrieb Aurelien:
> > Hi!
> >
> > The FREE label AMMD in which I work is going to buy and build a
> > professionnal studio based on free software and destined to produce free
> > arts only.
> > The project is quite advanced, but I'd like to know your mind about the
> > configuration we think about, and if there are people already using this
> > kinda material, any feedback would be welcome!
> >
> > So , here it is:
> >
> > - System : Ubuntu Studio and/or Debian self-customized for
> > audio-purposes. Does it have a big interest for such audio
> > applications to install a 64bits distribution? I suppose there will be
> > problems with some 32bits plugins, although there is the
> > ndispluginwrapper solution. It's bit like a troll, but it really
> > matters for us.
> Why do you need flash in a studio ?

No, I thought about effects plugs (synth, reverb, comp, and so on).

> > - Should work essentially with Ardour
> > - Hardware (PC):
> > . Proc: we were going on a dual core (Intel or AMD), but as we've
> > seen that quadri-pro are not so expensive anymore, what do you think
> > about it?
> depends on your workload. I can't comment on ardour or that stuff (If
> the app is multithreaded or not).
>
> You should stay away from 9x00 phenoms, (taht means intel right now, if
> you ar going to quadcore) as these chips are buggy. Bugfixed Phenoms
> will be called 9x50.
> > . RAM: 4Gb at least (if quadri-pro, much more)
> If you are going to 32bit, each application can use a maximum of
> probably 2 or 3 gbytes (don't know exactly the limit). If you start
> multiple applications, you can still exploit your ram. as unused ram
> would be used as page cache, 4 GB will make sense on a 32bit system, but
> 8 GB only if you are going to start multiple memory intensive apps in
> parallel

OK.

> > . Motherboard: we were thinking about using RAID (5 probably) in
> > order to increase reading speed, but it's only based on an
> > assumption (intuition?) that we could raise up the perf that way.
> > Are we right?
> I wouldn't say so. But i have nothing to proof my point. that's just my
> intuition. The raid stuff will increase bandwith, but worsen latency
> (eg. access time). I'd say that for TYPICAL sata hdds and usage
> patterns, the access time is more important than the bandwith.

Ahow... Perhaps. But on typical projects like 70-80 tracks to read
(that's what we're talking about, there are very big bands in our
label), don't you think bandwidth becomes predominant? (I don't have any
idea about it).

> > We'd like this motherboard not to have audio-embedded.
> all modern mainboards i know of have audio onboard. but you can disable
> it in the bios, or just blacklist the driver.
> > . Graphics: We just want something easy to install (no proprietary
> > drivers) that can driver 2 screens in Xinerama mode the easiest way
> > as possible (my ATI Radeon X850 GTO 16 is not a fair example!). We
> > don't have any idea about it actually, what about you?
> My notebook has an i965gm, which works perfectly. BUT it's not fast
> enough for serious gaming. (compiz-fusion works, and it's fast enough
> quake 3). If you are going to use 2 Screens, this implications apply:
> a) you need an ADD2 card for your mainboard
> b) you can only connect ONE monitor per DVI, the other one needs VGA

What do you mean?

> c) as the driver only supports 2048x2048 textures, you can forget about
> running compiz-fusion with an reasonable resolution per monitor.

OK, let's forget about compiz, it's not the purpose! I think we're gonna
use XFCE which should be light and usable for everybody (even those
sound ingeneers who don't have seen anything else than Mac OS !)

> > . Hard Drives: we think about a SATA drive for system, and
> > day-to-day life, and then think about an external SATA solution
> > which allows to bring a new drive for every project (there will
> > probably be something like 3 or 4 albums a year on this studio). Of
> > course, if we want our assumption upon RAID5 to work, we need to
> > have two identical eSATA drives for each record session.
> Nope, for RAID5 you need at least 3 harddisks. With 2 harddisks, you
> have the choice between RAID0 (performance, lower reliability) and RAID1
> (higher reliability)

OK, I have to get back to RAID and to learn a bit more about it.

-- 
==============================
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Received on Thu Mar 20 20:15:07 2008

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