hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2915.txt

Episode: 2915
Title: HPR2915: Intro - My Recording Setup
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2915/hpr2915.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 13:11:31

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This is HPR Episode 2915 entitled Intro My Recording Setup.
It is the first show by Newhost Karl, and is about 21 minutes long, and Karim a clean flag.
The summary is my first HPR Episode, a bit of an intro and a description of my recording setup.
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Hello HPR, this is Karl, this is my first episode, and I'm excited to get it over with to be honest with you.
We'll see how it goes at this point. I'm not sure if I'm going to get through to the end.
I'd like to first quickly say thank you to HPR and all the HPR contributors.
I haven't been listening long, but I really enjoyed all the content and the diversity of topics.
I'd also especially like to say thank you to Klatu.
It sounds kind of corny, I guess, but I feel like he's been the inspiration for me to even be sitting here talking into this microphone right now,
and for rekindling my interest in computers generally and Linux specifically, I guess.
Thank you, Klatu.
I don't know if you'll be able to tell or not, but I'm currently recording this audio on a different computer.
I'm using the same mic, but it's a different audio interface and actually a different computer.
The interface I'm recording on now is a Yamaha Geo 46 Firewire interface, and it's funny because I thought I would be able to tell you exactly when I bought it, but for the life of me I cannot find the receipt or the invoice in my email anywhere.
And I posted about it on a forum that I used to be involved with back in the mid-2000s, and that site is, you know, now, and I swear I just went to it a couple of weeks ago,
and now it's all jacked up and I can't access the post where I posted pictures of it.
But I want to say it was about probably sometime 2007-ish 2008.
I bought this Yamaha Geo 46 that I'm recording with now, with the intention of doing some digital audio workstation and stuff with the guitar and virtual instruments and things.
So yeah, so I bought it, you know, at least 10 years ago.
Didn't really use it that much.
I did find another post where I posted about it on the Reaper forum, and that was back in 2013.
And at that time I was looking for a laptop that still had a Firewire interface, which we're getting increasingly more difficult to find, especially new.
I ended up finding one at the local pawn shop. It was a Dell E6410, and it was probably a 2009 model laptop.
Again, you know, this is 2013, I'm talking about now.
So it was four years older, so when I bought it, and I got it for like $125 US dollars at the pawn shop.
I bought, maxed out the memory to 8GB, put an SSD in it, and I used that laptop up until just very recently, as a daily driver laptop, with Windows 7 on it.
And, you know, oddly for whatever reason, it's not odd, I guess, but typical.
I didn't really use it for what I bought it for, which was the Firewire interface, and this recording interface, or audio interface.
So fast forward again until, you know, until six, eight months ago or so, and I decided that I was going to completely get rid of all my Windows instances, at least personally, and switch over to Linux,
which I did, and I decided to go with Fedora everywhere I could, which is to say, everywhere.
I reloaded my nine-year-old, atom-based server with a headless command line, only a minimal install of Fedora, and that's been running very nicely.
I reloaded that nine-year-old laptop I was telling you about with the Firewire interface, I re-reloaded that with Fedora, and continued to use it.
So you can probably see the trend that I don't refresh my PC stuff very often.
The next thing I did was dig out a Chromebook, a 2015 Toshiba Chromebook that I bought from my wife back then, it had a really nice 1080p screen on it, and Chen had been using it because I got her a new laptop a while back, but so I dug that out.
Of course, I couldn't find the charger for it, so I had to order a charger that charger came in, and I put the new BIOS on the Chromebook from Mr. Chromebox, and then loaded Fedora on that Chromebook, which was, you know, it's only a 32-gig fixed storage with 4-gig RAM,
and a full regular load of Fedora with GNOME 3 on it, and it ran great, I thought.
So now I'm daily driving this Fedora-ized Chromebook, and the 6410 is in the corner of a collective dust.
Okay, so let's cut to the chase and fast forward to where I am right now.
A picture, if you will, a computer desk on that computer desk is a larger 27-inch 1080p monitor and a docking station.
The computer desk is not, it doesn't have like drawers either side, it's sort of open underneath and has shelves, and on one of those shelves underneath is the E6410 laptop I've been talking about, and it has, it's plugged in, but it's plugged into its power adapter and to an Ethernet switch.
The lid is closed on it, and on top of the closed lid of the laptop is the Yamaha Geo 46. Actually, no, I lied about that.
No, that's true. The Yamaha Geo 46 audio interface connected via Firewire cable to the laptop with the closed lid.
So my idea was that, well, I'm going to turn this 6410 into sort of a headless Firewire interface so that I can use this Yamaha audio interface, and I'm going to remote into it, and X11 for the couple of audio applications that I want to use over to my laptop.
That way I can have basically a dedicated audio processor that's running very minimal, very minimal amount of software on it, basically just the OS and whatever packages that I need to get like a doll or an audacity or something like that running, whatever dependencies it pulls in, there would be no desktop environment on it.
So I wanted to keep, you know, and I'm not arguing that this has any sort of logic to it necessarily or I'm not going to back it up with benchmark numbers or anything like that, but just sort of intuitively I thought that, hey, you know, if I, if I'm going to use this laptop as a sort of a dedicated hardware interface or audio interface, then I want it to be running as little as possible and dedicate all the RAM and compute resources that are on it to the job of
recording audio. So that was the idea. And that's what I did. So I installed a minimal version of OS of Fedora on it. And that was, you know, just the minimal base install plus there's a package option called standard, which is a few additional utilities.
And then I also installed the headless management tools option, which gives you the cockpit web interface, which is nice.
After that, so the workflow would go something like, hey, I'm going to do some recording. Let me walk over to the, to the, let me take my laptop.
Well, one of the things I wanted to steer clear of was having multiple computers around the house that had that I did different things on and that had, you know, I had files on some files on this one and some files on that one. And I mean, yes, I have a server, you know, that I can, I can dump stuff on and have a central storage location, but just generally I didn't really want to get into the habit of having
some things on my laptop and using my laptop for some things and then having this another computer that I use for audio work over at the desk.
So I thought that, you know, this idea of just using my laptop all the time and X11 forwarding a couple of windows from our application windows from the dedicated audio laptop over onto my normal daily driver laptop.
It was, you know, kind of a nice compromise, I guess, even though if you really want to, you want to get down to it, the recorded audio is on the other dedicated audio laptop.
And I'll have to move that at some point like this file I'm recording right now. But anyway.
So, so yeah, I did the minimal, minimal install on the 6410, added a couple of extra packages, then installed, you know, like audacity and let it pull in its dependencies.
I did some, you know, I'm not going to go into a lot of detail. I've got some notes written out and, you know, I'm not 100% sure that everything I did was actually necessary to get something like getting the X11 forwarding working and that kind of stuff.
So I'm going to skip some of that. There's plenty of info on the web about getting that working and, you know, they've only, it's only been, I don't know how long they've been doing X11 forwarding but 30 or 40 years, I don't know.
So it's pretty well documented at this point, including the security flaws of it, which I don't particularly care about.
So, so yeah, a couple of the other things I did, which I thought were, you know, kind of cool was one I wanted to be able to close the, the lid of the laptop and not have it go to sleep.
And I also wanted to close the lid of the laptop and have it turn the screen off.
But I also, I also did want it to bring the screen on when I opened it up again.
And I wanted to turn the screen off just because I was planning on having it closed at the majority of the time.
So, so yeah, so I found file Etsy under Etsy system D login login D.conf and edited some lines in there to ignore the switch lid.
So that prevented it from going to sleep.
The backlight, I was able to basically echo the, you know, echo the number one into CIS class backlight until backlight BL underscore power file.
And which turns off the, turns off the backlight.
And then I've got a little script with a UW rule that gets triggered when the, the lid switch is triggered to either turn off the backlight or turn on the backlight.
And that's all working great. So I can close the lid, the backlight goes off, the computer does not go to sleep, it stays up.
If I do have to get into it for whatever reason, you know, the back lights will come back on again.
Another cool thing on that, and I can't remember if I mentioned it now or not, but, you know, I didn't want to have to open, lift up the audio interface and open the lid and push the power button on the laptop to, to wake it up or to boot it up.
So I enabled wake on LAN and the BIOS and installed the WOL WOL wall utility on my main laptop.
So I can come in, I can come to the desk, I can sit down, I can dock and then send a wake on LAN signal to the, to the laptop on the shelf underneath it boots up.
And then I SSH with, you know, Tac X for X, the X11 forwarding and, and then start whatever application I'm going to use and it shows up on my laptop.
And that's, you know, it's all, that's all working really well. And, I was going to automate a lot of that so that it wasn't such a manual.
I mean, it's really not even that bad, but, you know, when you sit down, I wanted to have like a UDEV trigger or something when the Ethernet port, because normally on my laptop I'm Wi-Fi connected and I wanted to, when the Ethernet port came up, I wanted it to trigger the wake on LAN signal and do some of that other preliminary stuff.
So yeah, I had all that working and it was, and it was work surprisingly well. I was pretty, I was kind of surprised actually.
Well, you know, if, if that worked well, then it should only work better on newer hardware.
Again, you know, fast forward a little bit and after some late night eBaying and a couple of months of, of window shopping, I end, I've now have, I've now replaced the Chromebook with a, with an HP Pro book that I got off eBay.
Then I'm running Fedora on and for whatever reason I have no idea why, but I bought another Firewire interface on eBay, a focused right Sapphire Pro 24, which is what you're listening to me recording on right now.
And I just, and I bought and also bought a little HP small form factor Pro desk with a Intel Pentium G 4560 processor and a 16 gig of RAM.
And I got it specifically because it had a couple of half height PCIe slots on it so that I could put a Firewire card in it, which I did, which I did.
I got a Texas Instruments based, you know, because there's a whole, you start going down the, the old post about Firewire and, and interfaces being very finicky about what Firewire chipset cards, you know, the chipset on the cards that they like or don't like and,
it was, I guess, generally considered that Texas Instruments offered the best compatibility and performance of all the Firewire chipsets.
So I've got a PCIe Texas Instruments based Firewire card in there, which I then later sort of, also for me, which I sort of later then found that, you know, Firewire and the timing between Firewire sort of dying and PCIe.
PCIe becoming a popular slot.
There wasn't a lot of native, I guess there's not a lot of native Firewire chips or a lot of native PCIe Firewire chips.
So most of the Texas, for instance, the Texas Instruments card that I have the chip that's on it is not a, it wasn't for a PCIe slot.
There's a, there's another PCIe bridge chip on there. So a PCIe to PCIe bridge chip on that card, which, you know, supposedly can cause some problems.
And I was seeing some X runs during my testing. So I, via based Firewire chipset card that is a native PCIe chip.
And I got, I picked up one of those used on eBay for like $12.
And I'm using that currently right now. And it does actually seem to be more stable.
And performs pretty well with both the, the focus right interface and the Yamaha interface.
So, you know, so what started, I guess what I'm trying to say here is what, what started as a, hey, let me repurpose this old laptop I have as a Firewire interface so that I can repurpose my old audio.
Audio interface and, well, not repurposed, but continue to use it.
And, oh, let me reload my wife's old Chromebook with Fedora and you know, breathe new life into all of this old gear.
That all worked and it worked so well that I decided to buy a bunch of newer, yet still slightly old gear.
And, and do it on that to really know real obvious benefit other than it was kind of fun to do all the research and, and buy all the stuff.
So, yeah, so that's, I guess that's where I'm sitting today with it.
HP Probook on the desk here plugged into a USB-C dock, which is driving my, my second monitor and ethernet cable connected to a switch under the desk, which my small form factor pro desk computer is plugged into, which has the Firewire card into it, which is connected to the focus right Firewire interface.
And, I'm SSH into the pro desk from my pro book and X11 forwarding the currently using Reaper.
So, I've got the Reaper window X11 forwarded to my monitor here and QJAC control is running, talking into my MXL mic condenser mic.
And, so yeah, I mean, it's all kind of very exciting and seems to be working.
And, I think, I think I'm going to make that basically it for this episode. I didn't mean, you know, I don't even know if this is going to be listenable, but I'm going to submit it anyway just to do it and say that it's done and that I did one.
I'm going to stop talking very briefly and I'm going to wrap this up with by recording it by recording on yet a third interface and I'll tell you about that in just a second.
Okay, and I'm recording again on interface number three, which is a Steinberg UR22 MKII, which is, I guess, Mark to USB interface.
Same mic, same computer, USB interface, and I picked this interface up for like 75 bucks on Craigslist locally.
Gosh, I should have looked back through my email to see how long I've had this one, but it's been at least, I would guess probably two years now.
Kind of ridiculous. I've got two Firewire interfaces, a USB interface, and I guess one could argue that I should just be using the USB interface.
But there's not even bother with this Firewire stuff anymore, but there are some people that still say Firewire was a superior interface for audio work.
I don't know if that's still true. I don't know if it was ever true.
I guess I'm thinking that's about all I have to say for this episode.
So I think I'm just going to end it right there. So now you've got the rundown on my various pieces of audio equipment here and computers and old laptops and my current setup.
And I'm going to continue to tinker around with it, and because the more you tinker around with the tools, the less work you actually have to do.
So hopefully this won't be my first and only episode. I've got some ideas for additional episodes.
So thanks a lot for listening, and I'll see you next time.
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