[ILUG] Spoilt for choice at Elara

[Brendan Minish]

On Thu, 2009-03-26 at 10:22 +0000, Conor Daly wrote:

> Speaking of which, is one of these machines likely to be useable as an
> audio workstation. 

I ran a small commercial studio for around 10 years, At the time when I
got into doing non-linear editing and then recording on the PC
Multi-track audio was a very high end application and it took a lot of
work to get a machine built and tweaked such that you could run reliably
(I.e with paying clients in the room!) 16 to to 24 tracks of audio.

My last studio machine was a P4HT 2.8GHz box and it was fine for the
job, 24+ tracks at 24 bit along with plugins etc.

These days the requirements will be met by any reasonably powerful
multi-core CPU, plenty of ram and a reasonable performance SATA drive
(segate baracuda etc) 
It's a good idea to have a separate drive for the OS and application
software if practical, so that random I/O seek times don't become a
bottle neck after lots of heavy edits 

The machine needs to be quiet (no very loud fans) and many servers are
not built with quiet in mind.

The software I used was Steinberg Nuendo (expensive but well worth it in
my case at the time)  which required windows, I had better results and
stability with windows2000 as opposed to XP  

Latency is one of the primary issues that you face when working with
multi-track audio. My audio interface at the time was an RME audio
Hammerfall 9652 card this provided digital interfacing with my external
A-D converters and my digital mixing console and did not load the CPU.  

RME audio tended (even a few years ago) to have rock solid linux
support. 
I did not use linux in the studio at the time but if I was starting from
scratch I would most likely use linux and open source software.
These days Linux as a platform for audio has some significant advantages
over the alternates because it's fairly straightforward to to tune the
kernel for rock solid low latency audio.
The current state of Linux multi-track audio software is pretty good,
certainly close to where the expensive commercial software was at only a
few years ago. 
One thing that is missing are high quality software plugins for effects
but I am sure that this will change in time. 
In the mean time pick up a couple of good quality stand alone effects
processors on E-Bay, It will still be cheaper and far less hassle than
dealing with Waves audio and the associated dongles etc that they insist
you use. 
The Waves audio dongle caused me no end of issues with BOSD, audio
dropouts at low latency etc. 
Eventually I ended up running cracked versions of the plugins I had paid
nearly $1000 for so that I could remove the dongle and the problematic
software service that it used. 

Recently I took a look at a debian based distro called 64studio, this is
a distro designed for low latency audio and media production. 
http://www.64studio.com/
It seems to work very well, comes with a real time kernel, is easy to
install and is probably a good place to start.

Even if you decide to go down the proprietary software route (with it's
high software costs and stability issues) please try to support hardware
vendors who support good quality open source drivers for their
products. 
M-audio make some good mid-priced kit but there are many devices
supported by linux these days (but not unfortunately my expensive and
very nice sounding sound devices USB-pre )
USB may not be the best choice for low latency audio but it can
certainly work.
Don't discount the idea of using a '(semi-)pro grade' sound-card and an
external mixer as it may work out at a similar price to an all in one
USB solution yet be far more flexible   

check linux support for your proposed hardware here 
http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Main

Video Tutorial of how to build a Real time kernel for best low latency
audio performance 
http://www.linuxjournal.com/video/hyper-low-latency-audio-real-time-kernel


  
.brendan