Getting more crayons

[mdlbear]

Clearly, my 1GHz fanless Mini-ITX box (Harmony) isn't cutting it as a recording platform. Recording two tracks while playing two or three existing tracks works; trying to record while playing five or six tracks fails miserably. This is not good, folks.

Something Must Be Done.

When I did the multitracking on "Demon Lover" and "World Inside the Crystal" with Callie, I was using the machine that is now my main desktop. It worked fine, but was really too noisy for recording. And it's getting old -- the CPU fan and heatsink need replacing. The fileserver, Nova, is newer, faster, and a bit quieter. The simplest thing by far is to swap Nova and Harmony. That will also cut down on noise and power consumption in the server closet, which has been a goal of mine for some time now.

I'm thinking "out loud" here. There are a couple of alternatives:

The first is to keep nova's case, which is a full-sized tower, in the server rack. That puts the new Harmony in either one of my smaller Antec cases, or a new case. I'd prefer an Antec P150, which is a mini-tower, but that's $150 that I wasn't planning to spend. Still, it's only about half the price of a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM.

The other, cheaper and even simpler, is to move all of Nova but the disk drives into the bedroom/studio, and move the old Harmony into the box that's currently occupied by my gateway/router. That, in turn, can go into the other Mini-ITX case, a custom 1U enclosure, or just sit naked on a shelf. There is, just barely, room for the tower case under the bottom shelf in the bedroom, so that kind of works if I take a few things out to the garage. I may have to add some soundproofing. I can move it to a P150 later if I find one on sale.

It's more fiddling with computers than I really wanted to do this month, but it won't cost anything and will give me a recording machine I can trust, and a low-power, low-noise fileserver. So that's a win, for a lot less than I was originally expecting to spend.