24 Jul
2004
24 Jul
'04
2:39 a.m.
On Fri, 2004-07-23 at 19:56, caffeine wrote:
Hi everybody,
first of all thanks for your answers to my previous posts.
Now that I'm having fun playing around with a bass guitar and ecasound,
I'm thinking about buying an old laptop to use during rehersals and
maybe gigs. I'm wondering what kind of hardware would do the trick. I'm
kind of broke so the older (i.e. cheaper) the better (it would just run
a shell, a tweaked kernel, JACK and FX processing stuff).
I guess I may run into problems with obsolete sound cards (an area I'm
not much knowledgeable in) and probably other issues I don't know about
yet...
Anybody has any experience/knowledge to share ? What would be the
absolute minimum requirement for you ?
btw, I'm also wondering about vibrations damaging the hardware,
particularly the HD (the box would sit on top of a bass amp, or at least
not so far from it) What do you think about it ?
I was running a Dell CPXj 650mhz with a crappy old ESS Maestro 3 sound
chip for awhile. I could get reasonable latency but not real liveable
playing a live instrument thru. Anything under 1024 it did not like
much. These laptops are fairly robust and run about $450.00 US now if
you look. I also bought a CII docking station that could house 2 PCI
cards. I used a SBlive 5.1 for $19.00. The docking station I got on Ebay
for $60.00. THis was a better rig. The SBlive would handle lower
latency. But I was also running GUI (Fluxbox) and Qjackctl, Ardour or
Alsa Modular synth with LADSPA plugs.
R~
Thanks for taking the time to read this.