Recording studio in your pocket

As per the earlier post, I’ve been using something called “live” Linux ; which is where the entire O/S plus all software lives on a bootable media (CD) and doesn’t actually need a hard drive (!). Full GUI, mouse, network, sound etc. Windows cannot do this. It helped me rescue GB of data yesterday…

Now, there’s a good amount of musical recording/editing software for Linux; nearly all free and yet seen as professional quality.

Recently some guys have brought the two ideas together. They have the full Linux O/S, (inc GUI, network, sound, mouse etc). Whilst it can boot from a CD, they’ve squashed it onto a bootable USB Flash Key drive. With compression some 3 GB of s/w can squeeze onto 650 MB.

The beauty of using a USB key drive is that it frees up the CD for burning and it’s quicker than the CD. (The device that it boots from must remain in place as the O/S + all s/w lives there)

In theory you can plug this into ANY pc as it detects the h/w at boot time. They record away (it goes to the Flash drive), edit and can burn to CD or dump over a network to another PC. The main purpose is to fit all of this into the new very small PC cases called ITX. Their main project page