[Ardour-Users] Smallest PC for liverecording ?

[Jörn Nettingsmeier]

On 04/13/2011 08:41 PM, Svend-Erik K Madsen wrote:
> Hey
>
> I'm looking for at spare recorder for mobile recording. I got an old RME
> MultifaceI and a PCMCIA card, but what do I need in cpu and RAM to be
> able to record 6-10 tracks at a time.

my old 1.5g pentium m laptop was able to record 26 channels to the 
internal harddisk using a firewire interface (which hogs quite a lot of 
cpu).
the rme is orders of magnitude more efficient, so i'd say cpu-wise, 
anything that has a cardbus slot should be fine. disk throughput might 
be an issue on very old machines, but even that is unlikely to be a real 
problem.

if you're thinking of using ardour for live recording: make sure you 
crank up the disk buffers in .ardour/ardour.rc - i'm using 60(!) seconds 
for live recordings. this setting slows down edit operations a bit, but 
will reduce strain on the disk and make disk access vastly more efficient.

and as david said, go easy on the latency, and all will be well.
if your internal hd shows its age, i have had good results with an 
external usb disk. it might pay to look for an usb port which does not 
share an interrupt with other busy devices (such as the pc card slot).

best,

jörn



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Jörn Nettingsmeier
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