22 May
2006
22 May
'06
5:08 p.m.
hey.
thats a lot of questions, i am not quite sure what you are planning to do.
to compare "hw" vs "sw" in this case is a bit inappropriate - as all
digital
solutions use hw and some kind of sw. with a fast pc you can surely build an
audioworkstation far superior to most standalone boxes that, in most cases,
wont be able to give you as much features and tweakability as a real
workstation. id say this small boxes are just little cheap audioworkstations
with a limit range of uses. i suggest you take a look at
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/
then go and buy yourself a rme hammerfall spu, and install the above mentioned
software, newest alsa and newest jack-audio-system to the rme-pc. then start
adding applications to that system as soon as it runs. use qjackctl to
control the audiosystem of that workstation on a lightweight desktop, maybe a
small gnome or even just a mwm. this will give you a basis for almost
anything possible with sound. soundcards usually have a mixerdevice on them,
and a good soundcard will have a good hw-mixer on it that will let you
controll more than just the volumes of your channels and the
midi-functionality. there apps for jack for almost every need, and some, like
ardour and even many old stuff like eca or snd.
you have to do some hours of reading on all this, but it sure is worth it.
to answer your hardware questions a bit more specific:
as i said, get a rme card which fullfills your needs, use the fastet bus
options avaible, and go for a overall low latency system. fast ram, fast
disk... and keep the installed system as small and light as possible.
if your have gotten this far you will sure have a clue how to connect a
midikeyboard to your workstation and so on.
a major plus doing this the linux way is that it is cheap, and once stable it
just rocks. hope you find something to fit your audioneeds.
mfg
jonas beck
On Monday 22 May 2006 19:23, lanas wrote:
Hi folks,
I'm close now to getting some hardware, so I have more precise
questions before I hit one of the music stores. I'd like ot have to
suggestions/comments concerning a setup for doing what I'd liek to do.
And that is: being able to input sequencer data using three different
approaches: percussion, guitar and keyboard. For the sound sources,
I'm presently partial to hardware synths/samplers. Although I've got
some good sounds in the past (using soundfonts and a Live ! card and
MuSE) I still feel that the best sounds are from actual hardware synths
and samplers. I'd like to have some feedback on this. Are 'software'
sounds really that good when compared to actual hardware synths ? What
about samplers ? Are there any pro or semi-pro hardware synth and
sampler cards for the PC that could turn a PC (with an additional
external MIDI keyboard) into such a beast as these Korg (or
others') workstations ?
First of all I do not yet have a sound card for the AMD64 MSI K8N
Neo4 board I have (4GB RAM and lots of disk space). So far I see these
Hammerfall and M-Audio series.
I'd also like to get accoustic input from accoustic guitars, flutes,
and possibly voices/vocals.
And then there's the playback using good speakers.
And then there's the MIDI input when more than one MIDI instrument is
used at the same time. Surely there must be a patch bay of some sorts.
And there are the special effects, of which reverb would be mandatory
to start with.
So, if I choose the hardware sounds, I'll have to get some kind of
external mixer for the line outs of the synths and mikes, isn't it ?
What does Ardour mixes after all ? Can it control some kind of
hardware mixers of which the knobs were removed (cheaper price ?) so to
speak ?
Thanks a lot for any comments !
Cheers,
Al