Cubase

[Pleng]

Here's a hoopy idea.

The GP2x certianly has enough power to mix a few audio tracks together. Sure it'll be no cubase but eventually it could give simalarly priced and sized out-of-the-box products like the Boss BR series, the Korg PRS4, and The Zoom MRS8.

Starting off with a skeleton application that gave you 4 tracks on which you could simply adjust level and pan (which is probably all one would need if they just want to get a few ideas down) and the ability to record one track while the others are playing. Advanced mixing (eq, virtual tracks, effects) could be added in later if the project was sucessful.

Damn, that's just stuck me... I'm pretty sure the GP2x doesn't have a built in mic or line input... so I gues some sort of low-end usb auido interface would need to be supported (something like the griffen should suffice http://www.amazon.co.uk/Griffin-9066-IMIC2...dp/B000BVV2IC... high end devices could be supported if the project itself became more high-end)

Well not being able to code a line of, uh, code it;s all a pipe dream unless one of the clever bods on this forum also think it's a worthwile product!

 

[mrben]

I know that the Jokosher project have plans for a couple of sub-projects involving portable devices that might be applicable. One is for 'Jokosher-mini', which is basically a cutdown recorder. The other is 'Jokosher-remote', which is a remote control for a central computer that is running Jokosher, so that you don't need to be near your computer to start recording, for instance.

Could be interesting to see if some of the code is applicable, although I suspect that their reliance on GNOME/Gstreamer could be a stumbling block initially - they were working with a Nokia 770, but I'm not sure what that has in terms of software.

 

[WarmFluffyUK]

Being an audio type person I think it might be quite interesting, but I'm not sure how practical it would be. For me it would be nice to be able to capture audio, mess about with it and transfer it to the PC so it can be included in my music projects in Sonar. The problem with this is that the audio files would be rather large and I don't think the GP2X has enough RAM to be able to manipulate all the audio in real time. I would want to sample in 44.1Khz Stereo at 16bit. Ideally 32bit float would be better.

The GP2X audio hardware is good enough for games and playback of MP3s OGGs etc, but I suspect that the latency is too bad to be able to manipulate these streams of audio in real time. Probably the best you will be able to do is with a tracker style package. Now this would be good as you will probably be able to use the resulting output for games, so it's not all woe!

You're right about the lack of microphone, we would need some sort of USB mic project to go alongside the software project.

I'm interested in any audio package on the GP2X and would love to see the fruits of this thread. I had a heck of a lot of fun with Toby Drummer on the GP32, and that was just a basic drum machine !

 

[Pleng]

Well if you look at units such as the Korg PRX4 and the Boss BR532... most of them use some kind of compression to lower the amount of memory overhead required to process the streams, and also to keep the project files to a reasonable size (the units started out when memory cards were not exactly cheap). Personally I have a home stuido set up (computer free!) so for me the application would really only be for getting rough ideas down at a mates house, or whilst travelling... it wouldn't be used to make finished projects, they'd all be re-recorded in the studio, though I believe any application created should set out with the idea of being ABLE to create a finished project!

I would imagine the unit would be capable of 4 or more streams of compressed muisc... As you say the RAM is the bottleneck, not the CPU speed, which I presume would mean that there should be plenty of cpu power left for a few equalizers and plugins in a later version.

Latency I don't have a clue about. I always semi understood the princaples but could never really deal with it and all the issues surounding computer systems, which is why I reverted to hardware recorders.

If a person or group of people did manage to come up with a solution it would be absolutley amazing... the first open-source portable digital mulititrack that just happens to play games as well! I can just imagine the reviews in Sound on Sound magazine!

If anybody does pick up on the idea I'd be more than happy to help with interface concepts.