[ardour-users] Any advise changes I should make to this system?

[Andrew Johnston]

Hi everybody,
I've been a long time reader and seldom poster on the ardour list. I have
been using ardour in a very minimal way just for composing music with synths
and recording into ardour with jack. Now I am about to move into the big
leagues and buy a live PA/recording hybrid system and I want to use ardour
to record both live and studio work. Basically I want to make sure that
during live recording that NO MATTER WHAT, ardour doesn't crash....as the
recordings (which are mainly conferences and seminars) will be produced and
sold. Below is the system I'm using to start off until I can get more gear.

Mixer: Behringer DDX3216 with ADAT expansion
Soundcard: RME HDSP9652
Video Card: NVIDIA FX5700 with proprietary drivers (My own)
PC: Intel Pentium 4 2.66GHz 512MB RAM, Asus motherboard (PS4SGX), with
onbard SiS video (currently disabled)
(This is my own PC to start with so I'm planning on buying a second 250GB
Hard drive to separate my personal install (FC4) from dedicated audio
install)
Software: Fedora Core 3 with CCRMA setup/low latency etc etc.

I am using fedora as at that is what I know best. I use FC4 currently but I
know it is not stable enough to run ardour properly...is FC3 okay? I read
that I should be using the 2.4 Kernel for best stability. So is it cool to
downgrade the FC3 kernel to 2.4? or should I get FC2?

Does anybody know if the NVIDIA card will cause instability or try and hog
too many resources? Should I just use my onboard video?

Also I thought getting an external USB 2/firewire Hard Drive might be handy
instead of an internal, but I don't really trust it's speed or stability
over an internal SATA drive. I would also only do this if there was a way I
could boot off the external (ie keeping the whole OS and audio storage on
the same drive for the ability to use other computers if need be).

Also, I know that the mixer has automated/motorised faders which interfaces
with Steinbergs Cubase. Would that be just using the MMC protocol? Could I
hook it up to interface with ardour?

Any comments, advice, suggestions would be muchly appreciated...I will be
ordering the stuff in the next few days.

Cheers,
Andrew Johnston
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ardour.org/pipermail/ardour-users-ardour.org/attachments/20051016/4c227c63/attachment-0001.htm>