hi

Is there anybody in the list who uses a notebook (PC) for creation of sound ? I`d like to buy one for mobility but can not find any answer on the question of quality of sound. In specifications for some notebooks stands only "SBpro compatible stereo sound" comment. I dont know what does it mean, becouse it's just driver-standart, no more. Would it be enough quality (of a soundcard) for making sound? Have any experience?

Thanks. Andrey.

Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com

thank you pix for important notes

andrey

----- Original Message ----- From: "pix" pix@test.at To: "Andrey Savitsky" savitsky3000@yahoo.com Cc: pd-list@iem.kug.ac.at Sent: Friday, August 10, 2001 11:23 Subject: Re: [PD] notebook (PC) for creation of sound ?

the safest answer is that the quality is normally crap.

lots of issues are present like grounding problems (AC-hum) and general electrical noise. laptops have most of the noise problems that most pc soundcards have (emr from the cpu/videocard) but worse because everything is packed in so much closer.

but then again, depending on the kind of places you are intending on performing, it might not matter. the only problem i have had on night-club quality (?) pa's is the comparatively low output level of my laptop (because it distorts at higher volumes), but this can be compensated for. infact, i have had similar problems with desktop pc's.

if you want audiophile-quality sound, then you can look into some kind of outboard usb/firewire da converter. firewire probably being the smarter choice for multichannel (most usb models rarely have more than stero-output, they opt for lots of inputs).

there are also some supposedly high end pcmcia soundcards which are quite expensive ($1000US) but i haven't heard one.

pix.

On Fri, 10 Aug 2001 09:52:46 +0200 "Andrey Savitsky" savitsky3000@yahoo.com wrote:

Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com

Hi, the RME HDSP interface+breakout box seems to be a good choice. It uses a firewire connection with a PCMCIA or PCI interface. The price of $350 is only for the interface card, the bundle of PCMCIA+Multiface AD/DA box (ADAT IO+8 analog IO) is 1666 DM at thomann.de. Hopyfully, i get mine in about two or three weeks, then i can report on it. Meanwhile, RME has released some "tech infos" (http://www.rme-audio.de/english/techinfo/hdsp/notetabe.htm) where they published their experiences with some notebooks. According to this the Dell Inspiron suffers from a bug in its power saving mode. Apart from this it must be an excellent notebook. The other affordable firewire solution is the MOTU 828 which will not be available for Linux and Windows support is bad.

Concerning USB soundcards, there are some (Midiman Audiosport Duo/Quattro, Emagic 2|6, EgoSys and others) but as they are quite new, driver support is far from being complete. It would like to hear some feedback from people using any of these multichannel USB boxes.

greetings, Thomas

----- Original Message ----- From: "Ivica Bukvic" ico@fuse.net To: "Andrey Savitsky" savitsky3000@yahoo.com Cc: pd-list@iem.kug.ac.at Sent: Friday, August 10, 2001 4:00 PM Subject: RE: [PD] notebook (PC) for creation of sound ?

Hello,

I've been using Dell's Inspiron 8000 very successfully so far. Personally,

I

believe it is currently the best laptop on the market (obviously this is

my

opinion, nothing more :-). You can custom-configure it down to every

single

detail and it runs Linux out-of-box (except for one of the offered video cards: Geforce2Go, since it came out only 4 months ago, so no distribution had its drivers bundled, but Nvidia has a great Linux driver support so

the

post-install config is relatively easy). As a soundcard it uses ESS

Maestro

3i soundcard which is the best one I've seen bundled with a laptop (most,

if

not all laptop soundcards come integrated into the motherboard). It has a Line-in, Mic-in and audio out (Stereo), but the laptop itself also

supports

SPDIF out. On the other hand, if this is not satisfactory for ya, you can always get PCMCIA version of RME DSP (~24 channel, or somewhere around

that

number) card, but I am not sure if the Linux driver for that one is ready

as

of yet, and for that you got 2 PCMCIA ports. The laptop also has a

firewire

port and if you need raw Cpu power for real-time stuff, you can buy it as fast as 1 Ghz Pentium III (I used it on my recent performance of my thesis work using live sound processing/interaction with a guitar and had absolutely no problems whatsoever). Geforce2Go is also a real jewel of a video card, being the only hardware T&L video card for the mobile computer at this time, also utilizing 4x AGP (and Nvidia's drivers, although currently still having a few glitches, have a tremendous performance in Linux) and it really does wonders to Gem. You can also opt for a cheaper

ATI

Mobility M4 card (also 4x agp with 32MB of video RAM), but this type of

card

is extremely hard to configure for acceleration (using DRI), while its 2D XFree config is out-of-box, so you might wanna consider getting

AcceleratedX

with this one in order to get a good acceleration performance out of it (commercial version of X that can run you around $100-120 which in the end makes it more expensive solution than the other :-). In both cases you'll end up with one heck of a system. If you need more info regarding this system or have additional questions, please do not hesitate to e-mail me.

Ivica "Ico" Bukvic, composer http://meowing.ccm.uc.edu/~ico/ ico@fuse.net ============================ "To be is to do" - Socrates "To do is to be" - Sartre "Do be do be do" - Sinatra "Just do it!" - NIKE

-----Original Message----- From: Andrey Savitsky [mailto:savitsky3000@yahoo.com] Sent: Friday, August 10, 2001 3:53 AM To: pd-list@iem.kug.ac.at Subject: [PD] notebook (PC) for creation of sound ?

hi

Is there anybody in the list who uses a notebook (PC) for creation of

sound

? I`d like to buy one for mobility but can not find any answer on the

question

of quality of sound. In specifications for some notebooks stands only "SBpro compatible stereo sound" comment. I dont know what does it mean, becouse it's just driver-standart, no more. Would it be enough quality (of a soundcard) for making sound? Have any experience?

Thanks. Andrey.

_________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com

Hi im using a fujitsu siemens liteline lap with linux suse 7.1, everything goes fine here after some trouble configuring the graphic adapter (trident cyberblade). Im sure this isn't the ideal laptop for making music... but im really happy, latency is unnoticeable, and can use reasonably complex patches without getting the CPU meter too far up(AMDK6II), in fact i have never experienced cpu performance problems even running fairly CPU consuming patches like the phase vocoder in the /doc directory or a fairly complex "granular workshop" im working at. Not like in my wndws setups where working with audio is not possible as i get a huge latency and continuous clicks and pops. The only 'problem' i have is that i get occasional clicks when making sound and redrawing arrays simultaneously, but i think this was a general issue, am i right? I think somebody had a workaround for this running two pd instances one without graphic interface and the other without sound communicating via netsend (is this documented somewhere? i couldnt get it working)

My lap has also a built-in soundcard ESS maestro 3 (number 1870 i think), but in my case i/o is limited to just 1 mono input and stereo out (the output quality isnt too bad). Sometimes i have experienced problems with the fan: a couple of times when outputting sound & the fan started, pd seemed to freeze and the whole system slows down to snail speed during 4 or 5 minutes (the terminal reports 'signaling pd') and then back to normal. The problem goes away deactivating autofan in the bios (which frightens me a little). Somewhere i saw a message where somebody claimed that there were some laptop models where this could not be done so watch this.

Also i get occassional dac errors (IO stuck etc.. ) when using alsa drivers, so i use alsa's oss emulation preferably. OSS drivers went fine after a little experimentation with -frags flag. -frags didnt seem to do anything when using alsa so maybe there is a kind of tuning flag i could fiddle around with for alsa drivers too?

Im looking forward to getting some better i/o too. I heard about hamerfall PCMCIA, and Ego-Sys PCMCIA (?), but the shop won't let me test before buying so im a little frightened to buy before hearing about more people running similar setups succesfully. I thought i heard somewhere firewire wasnt the way to go yet in linux as it is little supported, or is somebody linux-laptop-sound-firewiring out there? I think some soundcards' alsa drivers cant get audio & midi working together o am i wrong again? (i would really like to twist my patches).

By the way, be careful ... laptop+pd = total pd addiction.

pd:..sorry for my english! ----- Original Message ----- From: "Andrey Savitsky" savitsky3000@yahoo.com To: pd-list@iem.kug.ac.at Sent: Friday, August 10, 2001 9:52 AM Subject: [PD] notebook (PC) for creation of sound ?

hi

Is there anybody in the list who uses a notebook (PC) for creation of

sound

? I`d like to buy one for mobility but can not find any answer on the

question

of quality of sound. In specifications for some notebooks stands only "SBpro compatible stereo sound" comment. I dont know what does it mean, becouse it's just driver-standart, no more. Would it be enough quality (of a soundcard) for making sound? Have any experience?

Thanks. Andrey.

---

Do You Yahoo!?

Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com

I understand what you are saying about the tabosc~ object but you are right i am looking for something different. Similar to gen function 10 in Csound where u simply send as many partials as you like to one oscillator. It cetainly would be a useful object. Thanks for the suggestion.

Regards, Rory.

Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.co.uk address at http://mail.yahoo.co.uk or your free @yahoo.ie address at http://mail.yahoo.ie

I can't find any tabosc~ object in pd. Is it an external ? I would like to play waveforms instead of a sum of oscillators. Should i use tabreceive~ ? Another related question: we got the osc~ object for a cosine oscillator, phasor~ for a sawtooth oscillator. But i'd like to use triangle, square or pulse oscillator too. What is the best way to generate such waveforms in pd and use them at any frequency ? BR nicolas

----- Original Message ----- From: "Michal Seta" mis@music.mcgill.ca To: "Rory Walsh" rorytheroar@yahoo.com; "pdlist" pd-list@iem.kug.ac.at Sent: Friday, August 10, 2001 6:56 PM Subject: Re: [PD] can one osc~ read several partials?

AFAIK if you're doing an additive synthesis thing you need as many osc~'s

as

partials. Which brings me to the following question for Miller:

Would it be difficult/possible to implement something similar to the Spawn function found in SuperCollider? Not that I want PD to head in SC

direction

but it certainly is a useful function.

Otherwise you can read tables filled with, say, waveforms into tabosc~ (am

I

right?) and this way you can have one osc read a complex waveform. But I have a feeling that this is not what you want to do.....

/MiS