Minimum system requirments for ardour

[jb8]

I recently installed Gentoo on a 733 MHz PIII machine with 512 MB of ram in the hopes I could use it to do some audio recording with Ardour through an M-Audio Delta-44 soundcard. I am using a gentoo kernel with the realtime-lsm module so I can run these apps without being logged in as root. The installation went very smoothly, but I get lots of xruns and performance is pretty bad while trying to record just ONE track.

Now, there are countless threads in these forums about tweaking your kernel to better support audio recording, but before I spend my whole weekend trying to get this to work, I want to find out if it's worth the effor. My recording needs are modest:

(1) I want to be able to record and playback at least 4 tracks simultaneously
(2) High latency isn't a problem, as I do all my monitoring through my mixer
(3) I don't need to run any synths or other sound-creating apps while using ardour- all I need this PC to do is record and playback audio. The effects and synths I use are external devices

Is it unrealistic to expect a 733 MHz PC with 512 MB of ram to record without xrun with ardour? Has anyone here been able to do this? I'm new to Ardour, so I don't have any previous experience to compare this to. Any comments/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.
John

[eldad]

Your RAM is just fine, but your processor may be the problem here.

I used to do recordings on a P-II/400 system without xruns, and I have the Delta-44 soundcard as well.
Though there was xruns recording 96kbps, when I recorded in 48kpbs it was smooth.

However, it is not very expensive to get a faster processor, and that what got me to buy a newer machine, and if you value your recordings I seriously urge you to get a faster CPU.
In my experience the realtime-lsm is the best way to go: I tried varoius kernel modes regarding preemption, but it worked best without any hickups using the "server" mode (no preemption) and the realtime-lsm together. YMMV.

If monitoring isn't a problem just increase your Frames/Period to 4096. that's maximum latency. This could help you reduce xruns with your current hardware.