Music Computer

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Musical Box

I spent some years planning to build a dual-Athlon LinuxBIOS workstation for my studio, but eventually gave up in 2002 as my goals of silent operation and fast processing seemed mutually exclusive. One day, I'll undoubtedly get back on the case, but until then, I soldier on with a 700MHz Pentium III which is almost sufficient for my studio's primary task of digitising all of my DAT archives. Once this epic work is done, I can think about 24-channel recording and mixing on a quad-Opteron system...

Update 2007-10-07

At last the tech has moved on sufficiently that I can now look at building something new. Here's my basic spec:

New music computer spec: silent, legacy-free and flash-based

No FDD, PATA or PS/2
No closed-source drivers
Black rackmountable/desktop chassis with silent fans
Dual core low power CPU + low speed silent fans
CoreBoot motherboard with onboard (W)LAN and DVI (with open source Linux drivers)
OGP/other dual DVI fanless graphics card for dual/triple head
RME HDSP PCI sound card and Digiface breakout box
4GB RAM (at least)
16GB Flash RAMdrive for 64Studio Operating System
Large eSATA2 USB drives in external enclosures for /mixes and /archives (can be hotplugged and switched off)
Quiet SATA DVD+-RW

And here's a work-in-progress list of parts: (I have no idea if these are compatible or would work as a system, no warranty, etc.)

Chassis: maybe Zalman HD135 or HUSH ATX or SilverStoneTek LC03v or LC10M
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800 (35W High Efficiency version) dual core processor (AMD part number ADD3800CUBOX)
MSI K9N NEO or Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 running CoreBoot
Seasonic S12II-380 power supply
Panaflo silent fans
OGP/ ATI Radeon X1000 or HD 2000 series dual DVI fanless graphics card for dual/triple head
RME HDSP PCI sound card and Digiface breakout box
4GB RAM (at least)
16GB Flash RAMdrive for 64Studio Operating System
Samsung Spinpoint T Series quiet hard disks in an external enclosure, removable, hot-swappable
Samsung SATA DVD+-RW
MatrixOrbital VFD displaying LMsensors data
Eizo L685 18" LCD x2 (or 3)
2 USB1.1 connectors:

USB1.1 hub on Eizo L685 18" LCD to connect slow peripherals:
- Dell spacesaver black USB keyboard
- Razer DeathAdder USB mouse
- Frontier TranzPort wireless remote (now works on Linux :-)
- (One spare USB1.1 socket)
Canon LiDE20 scanner

4 USB2.0 connectors:

80GB eSATA2 USB 2.5" single platter FDB laptop drive for /mixes (can be hotplugged and switched off)
160GB eSATA2 USB 3.5" single platter FDB external drives*3 for /archives (can be hotplugged and switched off)
Canon EOS digital SLR camera
Colour laser printer