Change of setup - opinions please ;-)

[dchurch24]

Hi all,

I finally got my setup working (thanks to some very special people here! - thanks again guys, you know who you are ). I had to pull out a 1gb ram stick sadly as it was damaged somehow and the machine would freeze randomly, so had to make do with 1gb. It worked ok, but using JamIN was nearly impossible.

However, I have a much 'beefier' machine - 2x64 bit (4 cores in total) AMD Opteron processors and 8gb of very fast RAM (>1ghz).

I am currently using the machine as a desktop, and was not "allowed" by the wife to use that box as a recording machine.However, we've just moved and she wanted it out of the living room, and I have a large spare room for my new computer/recording room - bonus!

The machine at present is used as a desktop and a mythtv server. It also monitors the temperature in the house via USB temp 'keys'.

It's running Ubuntu 8.10. I was thinking that this machine might be beefy enough to handle the audio recording as well as running the MythTV server and I could still use it as a desktop.

...or, I could use another machine as a MythTV server and dedicate the 'beefy' one to recording, and install Ubuntu Studio RT 8.04.

For what I am recording, just using the previous P4 3.2 with 1gb of ram and an old 120gb IDE drive did the trick, so I'm thinking that the bigger machine could handle everything I can throw at it and all I'd need to do is install the studio apps and off I go.

Also, I find my two 22in screens a bit restrictive (and this is just going to sound greedy) when having Ardour, Hydrogen, Jamin etc... open, and would like to use an extra 2 22in screens that I have spare. I have one SLI card in the machine, do I need to buy the exact same model again, or will any SLI supported card do the trick?

I'm rambling a bit now, but opinions would be very welcome as to the way to go.

[thorgal]

Hey dchurch24,

I would separate the mythtv server from the big machine. You do talk about a server, not a combo backend / frontend, do you ?

I also have a mythtv server at home, it runs a low power system (miniITX board VIA Epia en12000-eg fanless, 1.2 GHz C7 proc). I plugged a PVR 500 analog dual tuner card to its PCI slot. It tends to be old-fashioned considering the digital TV age we are entering. But this low power system works very nicely with a debian sid OS. The HD is a SATA2 2.5" WD scorpio black (excellent perf). The server is located among books on a book shelf, is fanless and thus totally silent (cannot even hear the HD activity in quiet ambiant noise). This will save you some bucks (EL bill).

If you are patient enough, you may want to wait for the nvidia ION board which should come up as a great low power combo backend / frontend since it contains a GeForce 9400 chip with HDMI output, and an Intel Atom CPU (can be dual core) at 1.6 GHz. My laptop is a already a great frontend with a pentium M 1.6 GHz and GeForce FX 5200 Go chip so the soon to come ION board shall really be something to consider.

Regarding the DAW aspect, I would watch out the 64bit side of things. If you're into VSTs (32 bit), you won't be able to use them if your sound apps (ardour, etc) are compiled for a 64 bit environment. You be warned

Make sure your 8GB RAM are really in use as well. Check that your kernel supports big mem (look into /proc/meminfo).

I don't know, this machine seems a bit too biffy for the task. You most of all need a good HD, good RAM, multicore CPU to seprate DSP and GUI stuff, non shared IRQ for the sound card, etc, and of course a fine tuning of the OS.

[dchurch24]

Hi and thanks for the reply.

The machine is running as a backend, although on occassion I start up the frontend just to have a look.

I also have a mini-itx machine running, but I couldn't get Myth to work on it for some reason, something to do with the chipset I seem to recall.

Good call about the 64 bit stuff - I hadn't realised that - yet I don't use VST instruments as most of the stuff I am recording is with real instruments (DX7, guitar, sitar etc...) and I like to record then add effects etc afterwards.

I was hoping not to have to run another machine (as a Myth Backend) as I already have 4 PCs on at any one time, and am becoming concious of the electricity bill!! ...but if needs must, then needs must!

The machine I intend to use has some good WD drives in it, with plenty of space (there's about 4tb in the case, with 2tb in external USB and NAS boxes). The machine is also on a UPS (just in case!).

The RAM is definetly seen by the OS btw. If I convert AVI to DVD and similar things, then you can see the ram being used in 'top' and in the resource gui thing.

[thorgal]

don't get me wrong, you may still have the mythtv stuff in the big PC. It just depends on your needs:

- how many TV cards do you have and how often do you record many shows at the same time ?
- would you record many audio tracks at the same time in a low latency environment ?

I also suspect that you have a NFS server running, a mysql DB and apache2 for mythweb. What if the family is at the same accessing recorded stuff from different frontends while tuners are recording like mad and you record some fine organ piece with plenty of tracks played back at the same time ?

[dchurch24]

Hello again,

I have 3 TV cards - two PCI and one USB, although to be honest, I could run another MythServer in one of the frontend as a secondary server (can't remember the terms they use over at the Myth site).

I only ever record 1 audio track at a time - although, I do have a friend who can sing and is keen to record with me, however, he can still record that once the music recording has been done.

I do have NFS running, although the recordings and videos/music are stored on a seperate NAS box (WD 1tb MyBookWorld) which I have managed to hack and get TinyLinux on, so the traffic from any viewings of that stuff should be kept seperate.

It's not very often that the myth box is recording at the same time as a front-end is viewing, although this does happen, and is more likely to happen in the evenings when I am actually recording, so I take your point.

I think I may set up my 'old' recording machine (considering I only got it working with your help about 3-4 weeks ago, it seems odd calling it 'old' ) as a myth backend server, put all the tv cards in there and simply use the bigger machine as my main/recording machine to be on the safe side.

Stuff the electricity bill!