[LAU] newbie to Linux audio

Reuben Martin reuben.m at gmail.com
Tue Jul 17 19:03:23 EDT 2007


I'm in the middle of building a rig for live location recording.

My recommendations are:

- You might want a RAID array if you plan on doing live multitracking
with a lot of channels. If you are just placing a pair of your own
condenser mics out to pick up the PA mix then that's not as important.

- Stay the hell away from USB, and be suspicious about firewire units.
Use PCI, or even better PCIe interfaces. I like (and use) RME's PCI(e)
based stuff. M-audio is good too.

- If you're going to be using the same mics as the house mix, get a
hard split and mount it on the back of your recording rig. Live
locations don't always have nice snake heads with splits built into
them and taking sends from a house or monitor console can introduce
all kinds of problems.

- Use external pre-amps and AD converters (i.e. don't try to get a
sound card that does everything. they suck)

- If you plan on using Linux, do your homework first on how well the
hardware is supported.

-Use Ardour, not Audacity

Of course, all this is expensive and assumes you are doing this for
production work and not just as a hobby...

-Reuben


On 7/17/07, Russell Button <russ at button.com> wrote:
> Hi Ken!
>
> I'm going to have to pass. USB 1.x just isn't going to cut it for 24
> bit, 96 kHz, live location recording. As you well know, a lot of
> products get built before they should because of issues like this.
> Reminds me of the NeXT computer, which probably would have been great on
> a 300 Mhz Pentium, but not a Motorola 68030 processor.
>
> Coolness,
>
> Russ
>
> Ken Restivo wrote:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > On Mon, Jul 16, 2007 at 06:45:12AM -0700, Russ Button wrote:
> >
> >> Loki Davison wrote:
> >>
> >>>> Russ Button wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>>> I'm looking to move into using Linux as my music platform for live
> >>>>> location recording.
> >>>>>
> >>> I'm very happy with my echo
> >>> interface and know some of the nice ones can be found on ebay that use
> >>> cardbus and pci if you want to use it at home too. I.e Mona.
> >>> http://www.echoaudio.com/Products/Discontinued/Mona/index.php
> >>>
> >> Okee Doki Loki!
> >>
> >> I'll bet nobody's ever said that to you before...
> >>
> >> But another question now comes to mind.  Do you use this Mona interface
> >> with your Linux box?  If so, do you use the Windows driver for the cardbus
> >> card with ndiswrapper or something?
> >>
> >>
> >
> > I have an old M-Audio Audiophile USB for sale. Has stereo RCA connectors in and out, line in, and requires a wall-wart. It also has SPDIF in/out which I haven't tried to use.
> >
> > - -ken
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
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> >
>
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