On Fri, 2004-07-23 at 19:56, caffeine wrote: > Hi everybody, > > first of all thanks for your answers to my previous posts. > Now that I'm having fun playing around with a bass guitar and ecasound, > I'm thinking about buying an old laptop to use during rehersals and > maybe gigs. I'm wondering what kind of hardware would do the trick. I'm > kind of broke so the older (i.e. cheaper) the better (it would just run > a shell, a tweaked kernel, JACK and FX processing stuff). > I guess I may run into problems with obsolete sound cards (an area I'm > not much knowledgeable in) and probably other issues I don't know about > yet... > > Anybody has any experience/knowledge to share ? What would be the > absolute minimum requirement for you ? > > btw, I'm also wondering about vibrations damaging the hardware, > particularly the HD (the box would sit on top of a bass amp, or at least > not so far from it) What do you think about it ? I was running a Dell CPXj 650mhz with a crappy old ESS Maestro 3 sound chip for awhile. I could get reasonable latency but not real liveable playing a live instrument thru. Anything under 1024 it did not like much. These laptops are fairly robust and run about $450.00 US now if you look. I also bought a CII docking station that could house 2 PCI cards. I used a SBlive 5.1 for $19.00. The docking station I got on Ebay for $60.00. THis was a better rig. The SBlive would handle lower latency. But I was also running GUI (Fluxbox) and Qjackctl, Ardour or Alsa Modular synth with LADSPA plugs. R~ Thanks for taking the time to read this.
