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