[PD] [OT] mini-ITX again

Martin Peach martin.peach at sympatico.ca
Sun Mar 2 23:56:30 CET 2008


Derek Holzer wrote:
> Hi Martin,
> 
> only stereo out for the SPDIF without proprietary stuff isn't too good. 
> But this is a totally normal problem. I haven't touched the 5.1+SPDIF 
> soundcard in my ShuttleX once since I bought it!

Yes, and all those soundblasters are supposed to be 5.1 but I never 
figured out how that happens, still less how to send more than 2 
channels to them from pd.

> 
> In regards to my question about the DAC+ADC, what I was asking about is 
> only the converters, which I could plug into the SPDIF, rather than a 
> complete soundcard. I use the RME Multiface every day for my own work, 
> and the Delta 66 is the first on my list for a cheap multichannel card, 
> so I am familiar with both already. But if the Mini-ITX has a digital 
> out already, and a standalone DAC/ADC unit is available, I would 
> investigate that.

AFAIK you can only get 2 channels with SPDIF, there is a 4 channel mode 
but who knows if anyone uses it...
Unfortunately the board has no SPDIF input, so ADC is ruled out.
There are some varieties of Mini-ITX with IEEE1394, maybe that would be 
better if there is any firewire hardware that works with linux.

> 
> The logging issue has been discussed here before. The solution is simply 
> to mount /var on a RAMdisk or similar, espc if the unit isn't online (as 
> a dedicated installation or sound performance unit might not be) and if 
> you think you've worked out all the hardware bugs (as HC is still 
> doing...heh heh) The AudioPint docs mention this as well.

Thanks for pointing this out, I'll give it a go.

Martin

> 
> best!
> d.
> 
> Martin Peach wrote:
>> Derek Holzer wrote:
>>> Hi Martin,
>>>
>>> thanks for the heads up. Does the SPDIF output work fine under 
>>> Ubuntu? How many channels is it good for?
>>
>> I imagine it carries a copy of the two-channel audio out, but I 
>> haven't tried it yet. The audio is supposed to be switchable to 5.1 
>> but that seems to be only available on Windows (the driver CD only has 
>> Windows files on it).
>>
>>>
>>> And on that tip...recommendations for a 4 or 8 channel DAC+ADC that 
>>> isn't the size of a telephone book?
>>
>> Well the Hammerfall MultifaceII is 1/2 rackmount, you need either the 
>> PCI or PCMCIA card as well. It's well supported in linux but it's 
>> expensive. The M-audio Delta 66 might be good, the audio interface is 
>> smaller than the Multiface and has 4 ins and 4 outs. It's probably the 
>> same hardware as the delta 1010 but with less I/O, so it should work 
>> fine.
>>
>>>
>>> Last quiz question: how noisy is the fan on that sucker?
>>>
>>
>> It's a fanless board at the cost of running at 1GHz instead of 1.5. 
>> There's a small fan in the case that's about as loud as the hard 
>> drive. Probably you won't need it if the box is well ventilated. It 
>> would be nice to run everything from a compact flash card but there's 
>> the problem of logging -- right now I'm getting disk accesses every 
>> ten seconds or so, which would wear out the card. Maybe logging to a 
>> small expendable CF card while running off a larger one would work, or 
>> logging to another machine.
>>
>> Martin
> 
> 




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