I have been teaching myself a little bit about mastering using
jack and jamin. My system is a PIII 550, I'm using the
onboard YMFPCI sound card.
There was most def a learning curve but I did manage to finish
the proof project that I was working on. So unless there is
some specific technical difficulty with your particular
combination of hardware then doing dsp in real time on your
800 MHz machine shouldn't be too difficult.
I did have some success running ecasound -> jamin -> ecasound
+ PCM out to monitor the mastering process. There was some
assorted weirdness with the tracks that I recorded this way
though.
To see if what I was trying to do was even possible I then
went to alsaplayer -> jamin -> ecasound. This seemed to
eliminate some of the difficulties I was having with using eca
for playback and recording.
Using 4 periods of 4096 samples was almost entirely stable but
I did still get the occasional xrun, especially when
processing tracks ~60 mins. On the whole it was doable
though. And there are still refinements to be made to the
process I used, and doubtless a dozen other ways to use Linux
for dsp.
After I take a little break and get the caught up on other
things I'll bother you all with some of the questions that arose.
Ciao,
Barton