Thank you so much, Luigi, for your answer

El 31/12/2005, a las 1:42, Luigi Rensinghoff escribió:

...

I am considering the possibility of running some multichannel pd patches in some machine running some linux distribution. The patches would reach some complexity and address sound over 6 independent analogic audio lines. Could anybody give me some advise about which linux distribution and hardware setup (computer and sound card) should be needed for such a project?

I've been googling for a while and found http://www.alsa-project.org/ alsa-doc/index.php?vendor=All#matrix. There is a pretty big list of ALSA compliant sound devices, but I'm sure you have your own opinions and I would like read about them before making any decision.

Thank you in advance for any comments and suggestions.

Jose Manuel Berenguer jmbeal@telefonica.net +34932857046 696538403 jmberenguer@cccb.org +34933064128 http://ocaos.cccb.org/jmb/index.html Sonoscop/Orquesta del Caos. CCCB. Montalegre, 5. 08001 Barcelona.
Spain

Well.....its pretty unclear....what you write....of course it
depends on the budget......

because there is no any big problem with budget, I didn't give any
information about this. sorry.

if you need 6 channels alltogether...you dont need more than one pc
and one soundcard

well, not all soundcards I know are able to produce 6 independent
analog sound signals. actually, I wanted to know the hardware that
people was using rigth now.

Could it be a desktop or does it have to be Laptop ??

It can be a desktop computer. It should be a quite powerful one. I
give some reasons below.

From there the question: what interface...i am using the RME
Hammerfall with Multiface..which can be pretty hard to get going especially with
PCMCIA on laptops but it works.

I believe I just need a PCI soundcard. do you think there are some
PCI Multichannel cards easier to install than Hammerfall's?

Any multichannel USB device should work as well. Firewire could
still cause trouble.

What do you want to do with the 6 channels ?? Lot of audio
processing, that might set the minimum of cpu power.

quite complex patches, I said. by the way, implementing all sort of
synthesis algorithms. for instance, granulation algorithms with a lot
of granulators changing granulation parameters depending on incoming
values from an accelerometer that is giving values to the serial
port. also, multiple fft filtering instances behaving independently,
and so on... I can't be more precise because I haven't already
written the patches. I use to write them progresively until I feel
the machine is reaching some reasonable limit of cpu charge.

So the next question. How deep wuld you like to go into linux ?

I believe there shouldn't be big problems here. despite of I don't
have a very big experience in linux -I've just administrated one
server running linux-, I know quite deeply other operating systems
belonging to the Unix family.

There are distributions that work more or less out of the box...
DEMUDI or Planet CCRMA or even a live cd like dynebolic could do the job..if
you want maximum optimization and spend a lot of time you should go with gentoo

well, if I ask here, it is because I haven't a lot of time to
research by myself :(

Anyway...

Tell me more...i am happy to help

I think I'll have a lot of questions for you after having made some
decision, bought a computer and a soundcard and installed a linux
distribution ... anyway, I hope when linux and hardware have been
sucessfully installed, the pd installation is quite straigthforward.
or not?

saludos

Luigi

grazie!

jose manuel