[LAU] small/cheap devices that can run jackd?

Ken Restivo ken at restivo.org
Wed Nov 16 00:29:12 UTC 2011


On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 11:12:06PM -1000, david wrote:
> Ken Restivo wrote:
>> On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 10:10:13PM -1000, david wrote:
>>> Jeremy Jongepier wrote:
>>>> On 10/24/2011 07:23 PM, Alessandro Preziosi (licnep) wrote:
>>>>> Does anybody have any idea for a device
>>>>> (smartphone/tablet/netbook/mini-pc...) that could run jackd and thus be used
>>>>> as an effects processor or synth module?
>>>>> I really don't know where to look, but the idea intrigues me. It should
>>>>> probably be something with a usb port, in order to connect midi stuff or an
>>>>> external audio card.
>>>>> Any idea?
>>>> Hello Alessandro,
>>>>
>>>> A netbook is probably your best bet. I'm using a cheap Packard Bell
>>>> myself as a guitar effect unit or as a synth module. Took some time to
>>>> set it up but it works remarkably well.
>>> And if you set it up so it's running either no GUI or a very light   
>>> desktop environment, and turn off things like wireless, it should 
>>> work  reasonably. I believe the person on the list who uses a netbook 
>>> for  synthesizer uses linxusampler loading a 4GB piano aoundfont on a 
>>> 2GB  netbook without any problems.
>>
>> That would have been me, I think. I gigged more or less constantly with this for over 2 years.
>>
>> Circa 2008 era Asus EEE 1000, 1.2Ghz Atom, with SSD drive, 2GB RAM.
>>
>> I ran, simultaneously, LinuxSampler, several FluidSynth instances, MonoSynth, Beatrix, several Jack-Rack instances packed with LADSPA stuff, a mixer app, some homegrown daemons in c and pythin, and some other stuff I can't remember right now. Live. All night long. This was of course with an Ingo RT kernel.
>>
>> Worked great. I'd recommend netbooks for Linux audio live performance.
>
> Thanks, Ken, thought it was you. The newer netbooks (my wife's is about  
> 6 months old) runs a dual-core, 1.6GHz Atom.
>

I should note, IIRC mine isn't dual-core, but it lied and said it was, it using some weird hyperthreading thing. It crashed the Ingo RT kernel, so I turned it off in the BIOS. It's a single-core machine, and shows up as a single-core machine, and all is well.

-ken


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