Hi Paul: Ah, I was under the mistaken impression that the 66 had MIDI. Hmm, that won't really make a difference, I can use one of my other cards for MIDI I/O. Best, dp Paul Winkler wrote:

Alexander Franca schrieb: This is a topic that concerns me, too. First about ATRAC and MP3: I don´t know who invented ATRAC data reduction proceeding on MD. But it is another than mp3. So you need a conversion software for that. Sony gives you for that procedure a software called OpenMG JukeBox. It changes the mp3 format to ATRAC and lets You check in and out tracks from your computer to your MD walkman and only back to your computer. Other tracks that you have recorded on a minidisk the software recognizes but you cannot "check in" to your pc. This has to do with the registration code of Win XP and other versions of the other os I suggest. The software recognizes tracks that you got from other pc´s via USB and does not let you copy on any other system. Sony puts the Net MD player together with an USB 2.0 adapter cable and also with an optical cable for optical line input. Sorry but I don´t know if your specific MD Walkman is bundled with this because I didn´t follow your link. I suggest it is so. I don´t know MD Walkmen of other brands, not so much about technology or whether other brands support technology copying your own files from and to pc, but this is what I know. My brother has got another Net MD Walkman from Sony using it for work as a professional music therapist. He records his work onto MiniDisk to do some rehearsal after his sessions. He wants to backup his work, means copy to a pc to get mp3s out of it. He is not due to pc, winblows... so as I do but he doesn´t want to copy his tracks via sampling the whole thing twice in real time (first when he recorded it and then home sampling with a pc. This is also not easy because he sets track marks on rehearsal and he wants the mp3s to be the same. That means half an hour of music with I suggest up to 30 track marks. Any recomendation about a technique that supports reading out tracks from ATRAC in linux / winblows not in real time with saving tracks "as is" maybe through usb or reading from a professional MD recorder digital spdif input maybe with double speed and resampling... Thanks for any note Marius Janssen

Dave Phillips wrote: Dave, Well, obviously an 800MHz machine will at first glance seem underpowered compared to all the newer stuff out there, but my thought is that for just recording/playback you'll probably be fine if you pay close attention to the rest of your hardware. Good optimization, a good audio drive, etc. and you'll probably be fine up to a somewhat limited track count. (8? 10? 12? 14? just guesses...) Get other people's inputs, most especially those who really depend on Linux, but instead of a new MB, new processor, new memory, etc., and all that money, consider adding a second drive (or maybe an external 1394 hard drive) to this machine for audio. Internally it's pretty cheap, and for 1394 this is probably no more than $150 for a 60GB drive in a 1394 case. Add a 1394 adapter and off you go. It's the way I work on Pro Tools. Really consider 1394b if you want to protect your monetary investment, but be advised that there hasn't been all that much Linux-based 1394b testing done yet and the 2.6 series kernel support is very much in flux. When you do eventually get a new system you just plug the drive in and off you go, even with a new laptop should you go that way. Good luck whatever you do. You're an amazing credit to this whole Linux audio movement. Cheers, Mark

On Thu, Sep 02, 2004 at 09:51:25AM -0700, Mark Knecht wrote: I'm running still on a PIII/866 and I get by just fine in Ardour. But I don't think I've yet gone above 8 tracks and a handful of plugins. -- Paul Winkler http://www.slinkp.com

Dave Phillips wrote: 1394 hard drives work pretty well for me under both the 2.4 Planet kernels and 2.6 Gentoo kernel. I have more trouble with CDRW/DVD drives which do not work well under either in my experience. This is probably not an issue for you. I do 1394 chips and software for a living so I try a lot of this out on my company's nickle. 1394 performance under Linux is not what it should/could be. The Linux 1394 stack doesn't optimize gap count automatically so throughput is slow. (Maybe 5-11MB/S?) I think there may be some little stand alone apps that will allow you to set the gap count by hand which would help. Humm...I just remembered that I had my main Pro Tools 1394 audio drive in my laptop bag so I plugged it in and ran hdparm to get some results. Better than I thought: root@flash ~ # hdparm -tT /dev/sda1 /dev/sda1: Timing buffer-cache reads: 1640 MB in 2.00 seconds = 818.49 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 56 MB in 3.15 seconds = 17.75 MB/sec Speeds are higher under Windows, but this isn't bad at all. root@flash ~ # uname -a Linux flash 2.6.8-gentoo-r2 #3 Fri Aug 27 11:05:03 PDT 2004 i686 Mobile Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.06GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux root@flash ~ # I don't have a 2.4 series kernel here to test with. My laptop's chipset doesn't work well under 2.4. Too new and many important things not supported. I don't remember how to extract the actual IDE drive parameters out of this 1394 drive case. I think the drive is a 7200RPM but it could be 5400. I don't remember and I'm sure anything you bought today would be faster. I've used this one for 18-24 months at least. The drive is set up with larger than normal (32K) cluster sizes and is a FAT drive so that I can use with both Pro Tools and other OS's as required. (Heck - I just did!) ;-) From dmesg: <SNIP> ieee1394: Host added: ID:BUS[0-00:1023] GUID[413f0200b723013d] ip1394: $Rev: 1224 $ Ben Collins &lt;bcollins(a)debian.org&gt; ip1394: eth1: IEEE-1394 IPv4 over 1394 Ethernet (fw-host0) eth0: link up, 10Mbps, half-duplex, lpa 0x0000 ieee1394: Node added: ID:BUS[0-01:1023] GUID[0001d20000030fc1] ieee1394: The root node is not cycle master capable; selecting a new root node and resetting... ieee1394: Node changed: 0-01:1023 -> 0-00:1023 ieee1394: Node changed: 0-00:1023 -> 0-01:1023 sbp2: $Rev: 1219 $ Ben Collins &lt;bcollins(a)debian.org&gt; scsi0 : SCSI emulation for IEEE-1394 SBP-2 Devices ieee1394: sbp2: Logged into SBP-2 device ieee1394: Node 0-00:1023: Max speed [S400] - Max payload [2048] Vendor: WDC WD40 Model: 0BB-32CXA0 Rev: Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 06 Attached scsi generic sg0 at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0, type 0 SCSI device sda: 78165360 512-byte hdwr sectors (40021 MB) sda: asking for cache data failed sda: assuming drive cache: write through /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0: p1 Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 root@flash ~ # <SNIP> HTH, Mark

On Thu, 2004-09-02 at 13:12, Tobias wrote: I don't know of any Linux folks that depend on 1394 for audio. I use it under Windows successfully. It seems to *work* under Linux, meaning well enough to do a little testing, or even record a lot of tracks in the studio in some made up test case, but I don't use Ardour so I cannot comment on whether it's stable enough day inand day out. I've ordered a number of units from http://fwdepot.com. Most have worked with Linux, but not all so I'm very hesitant to really recommend anything. I know my Ice Case drive units have consistently been the best. The Pyro stuff has been OK for hard drives but not for other stuff. Linux 1394 is *only* 5 years old. It still doesn't optimize gap count on a simple 2 device bus even with the newest drivers, or some I'm told. Go in this direction with lots of careful reading... No, I think that's about the right price. If they use Oxford Semi chipsets, most notibly the 911 for 1394a, then they have been pretty good for most folks. I'm about ready to get a 1394b drive and cardbus adapter and try that out, again mostly in Windows but certainly a bit under Linux...

On Thu, Sep 02, 2004 at 02:00:22PM -0400, Eric Dantan Rzewnicki wrote: Since Mark mentioned the 2 disk approach, I wanted to mention that both my old PII system and my newer athlon system had separate system and audio drives. The old box got >20MB/s in hdparm -t tests. The new box gets >45MB/s. -Eric Rz.