Silent pc (Re: [ardour-users] Session export ?

[Mark Knecht]

On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 21:16:24 +0100, gerard van dongen <gml at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 11:14:35 -0800, Matthew Sewell
> <matthewsewell at ojai.net> wrote:
> 
> > Changing the subject for a moment...I need to make several hardware
> > upgrades to accommodate Ardour.  First, I will be replacing my cheap-ass
> > motherboard (with the dreaded VIA chipset) and Athlon 1800 with a Dragon
> > 2 P41865PE with an Intel chipset and 1.8 gHz P4--both of which I have
> > lying around.
> >
> > I don't have the money to upgrade to SATA drives yet.  Currently, I am
> > running 2 80-gig drives on IDE channel 1 and an old 20 gig and dvd
> > burner on IDE channel 2.  The first IDE drive on channel 1 is my system
> > drive and the second is my data drive to which I write the Ardour
> > projects.  Drive 1 is ext3 and drive 2 is reiserfs.
> >
> > My plan is to buy a gig of ram for the Dragon 2, ditch the 20 gig drive,
> > upgrade from RH9 to FC3, move the dvd drive to the same IDE channel as
> > the system disk, and move the data drive to IDE channel 2 where it will
> > be the only drive.
> >
> >
> That sounds fine. Stay away from reiserfs for your audio disk though. ext3
> of XFS is better for big files like audio files.
> Unless you have a massive multichannel soundcard, you can easily move all
> the tracks you want from a single modern ide disk.
> I just tested and I got 48 tracks playback without problem. It is only
> when there are also a soundcards moving 24 channels or more at the same
> time that you may run into trouble.
> 
> Gerard

Yeah, I pretty much agree. I use an external 1394a (400Mb/S) drive for
both Ardour and LinuxSampler. I have two partitions. The audio
partition is set up as VFAT and allows me to move data pretty easily
between Ardour and Pro Tools. The LinuxSampler gig files are on a
second partition done with ext3 since GigaStudio under either Win ME
or Win XP won't work worth a darn using 1394 so that machine has a
second drive in it for just samples.

Using the same 1394 drive I have no problems using 4 sample libraries
(4 gig files) in LS and recording 8 channels of audio in Ardour. I've
never had an error message so far and it all streams off and on the
same drive.

I have a  'massive multichannel soundcard' (HDSP 9652) but I seldom
move more than about 8 channels in and 12 channels out at the same
time. Probably Jack is still moving 26 in and 26 out - I don't know.
Anyway, it works fine in an Athlon XP 1600+ machine using 'the dreaded
Via chipset'! ;-) ;-)

- Mark

P.S. - I swear by Via chipsets. Very few problems in my history using
them in DAWs. I actually look for them.