23 Mar
2005
23 Mar
'05
5:01 a.m.
Jordan wrote:
Hello all. I don't really have any business
asking, but I am more and
more interested in digital HD recording, and I have spent many hours
recently studying hardware, software, techniques, et cetera. I don't
really have the funds to create such a system, but it is fun to plan
it out, in case my church or someone else would be interested in such
a system in the future.
The recent discussion of jack over networks has gotten me wondering a
few things.
Here is my current fantasy rack setup:
1U: UPS
1U: KVM
2U: RAID
2U: Master/DAW
1U: Slave Recorder/Node
1U: Slave Recorder/Node
1U: Slave Recorder/Node
1U: Slave Recorder/Node
1U: Gigabit ethernet switch (all computers connected through it)
Basically, all slaves would boot off of the RAID server (for easier
maintenance) into a cut-down Linux kernel, and will boot into
text-only mode, starting only the programs absolutely required to run
Ecasound. The slave node would begin recording when the master tells
it to, and all audio data would be sent to the RAID server. I am
thinking that each slave would be able to handle 8 channels of mono
input. All nodes would be equipped with the OpenMosix software, so
that they can assist the Master when they are not busy.
I think the usage of openmosix might be dangerous wrt bandwith. If I
remember correctly, openmosix can generate a lot of ethernet traffic. I
also thought that jack.udp works reliably only on rather 'unbusy'
networks, so I wonder wat would happen when openmosix descides to
migrate a process to another machine (hence generating peak traffic).
Regarding this topic and the previous topic on jack.udp sync: We at the
freebob project had the idea of implementing a feature into our backend
that would allow a PC to be used as a 'FreeBob' device. (FreeBob is a
driver project for certain firewire based audio interfaces)
Using firewire as a transport layer for audio can solve some problems,
mainly those of sync and QoS. The scenario I had in mind was something
like you describe above, but using FW for the audio transport between
machines.
The idea is still rather vague, but nevertheless...
Pieter