[linux-audio-user] minimum requirement for a real-time FX processing machine

[Russell Hanaghan]

On Fri, 2004-07-23 at 19:56, caffeine wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> 
> first of all thanks for your answers to my previous posts.
> Now that I'm having fun playing around with a bass guitar and ecasound,
> I'm thinking about buying an old laptop to use during rehersals and
> maybe gigs. I'm wondering what kind of hardware would do the trick. I'm
> kind of broke so the older (i.e. cheaper) the better (it would just run
> a shell, a tweaked kernel, JACK and FX processing stuff).
> I guess I may run into problems with obsolete sound cards (an area I'm
> not much knowledgeable in) and probably other issues I don't know about
> yet...
> 
> Anybody has any experience/knowledge to share ? What would be the
> absolute minimum requirement for you ?
> 
> btw, I'm also wondering about vibrations damaging the hardware,
> particularly the HD (the box would sit on top of a bass amp, or at least
> not so far from it) What do you think about it ?

I was running a Dell CPXj 650mhz with a crappy old ESS Maestro 3 sound
chip for awhile. I could get reasonable latency but not real liveable
playing a live instrument thru. Anything under 1024 it did not like
much. These laptops are fairly robust and run about $450.00 US now if
you look. I also bought a CII docking station that could house 2 PCI
cards. I used a SBlive 5.1 for $19.00. The docking station I got on Ebay
for $60.00. THis was a better rig. The SBlive would handle lower
latency. But I was also running GUI (Fluxbox) and Qjackctl, Ardour or
Alsa Modular synth with LADSPA plugs.

R~
Thanks for taking the time to read this.