Tracks

[mdlbear]

I love audacity. Fixed sync problems in the choruses of "Little Computing Machine" and "Daddy's World", added reverb and tweaked levels on "Somplace in the Net". On "Net" there was one spot where the guitar was a little too hot, which of course meant it was too low everyplace else.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Hey, remind me again, how hotshot of a laptop would I have to have to do live stereo recordings? No compression encoding on the fly, just slap the bits on the drive and shrink'em later. I'm seriously considering recording some of tfabris and vixyish's shows... that and maybe some ohiblather-type stuff, too.... though with all that hardwood I'm not sure where I would want to take sound...

[hms42]

Anything in hte past 5 years. Try to have at least 512mb ram and 30gig of disc space.. I have used p4 based machines with windows and an intel MacBook Pro.

both work. If you are at Conterpoint, track me down and I can show you the software/tools I am using.

I will be trying to capture their concert here. (I know I am getting Dave Weingart's concert.)

Harold S.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

So, what, gigglehertz or better?

Alas, no Counterpoint for me, I am in mid-move... but I'm definitely interested in filkerdave's concert...

[hms42]

Worst machine I have used for recording was a p4-2.4gig laptop with 30gig HD. (Produced one CD via that borrowed laptop. Switched to MacBook Pro in March 2006.)

I would recommend at least a P4 machine (although you can likely use a high p3), if windows based. If Mac based, definately a powerbook for the LINE IN option. (iBooks don't have that feature, but MacBooks do.)

Audacity (which Mdlbear mentions in a later message) is what I use to record on the road and I would use anything it says is recommended.

With the MacBook Pro (my current laptop), I was able to burn CD-Rs (or DVD-R in a few cases) of the concerts right after the concerts and handed them to the performers. (Raw recordings).

Adobe Audition (which is my Windows based editing software) requires at least a p3/500 (newer version says P3 or P4 machine.

Their concert was good and I am listening to it now.

Harold

[mdlbear]

RAM is good -- the more the better. Local disk is good -- you really shouldn't go direct to NFS, though I've gotten away with it for stereo. Don't even consider it for multitrack. If you have a soundcard that records 24 bits (which I strongly recommend) you'll need 20MB/minute for stereo. If you want to store that as floating point, you'll need an x86 processor with decent floating point performance (i.e., not a VIA CPU).

I've recorded using an 800MHz mini-ITX board, but only with the display on a separate X server. Shared memory video is a killer, though I've been told that it works if you turn off DRI in xorg.conf. I'm going to try console-mode recording using ecasound -- that should work better on a small machine. Ideally with no display beyond a little 4-line LCD. In other words, a dedicated Linux-based recorder.

Once you have a concert recorded, you need a hotter machine for editing, and a much hotter machine for multitrack recording and editing. I'm finally pretty happy with a 1.8GHz Core2 Duo with 2GB of RAM. Unlike recording tracks, editing works just fine over NFS.

Most of my field recording has been done using Audacity on a MacBook Pro and a cheap Behringer C2 stereo pair. The Mac seems to have better out-of-the-box support for my USB audio interface, but I'll eventually get that working.

Make sure you turn off power management so the laptop doesn't go to sleep on you, and make sure you're either on wall power or some darned hefty batteries.

[mdlbear]

I should add that my M-Audio 4-channel board (Delta 66) specifies a 500MHz CPU. 24 bits * 4 channels * 44.1KHz works out to about 6MHz, IIRC, so we're not talking a huge amount of bandwidth. It's the latency that'll get you -- use a low-latency kernel from 64studio.com or ubuntustudio.org

For the moment, you'll have to build audacity from source if you want a Linux version of the latest-and-greatest that's compatible with the MacBook Pro.