So then my next question is will the 1GB of ram be enough for mixing on ardour when using let’s say 16-32 tracks. Since it’s steaming the tracks. I know project folders can be large but since steaming is how it’s done. I wonder if ram shortage will be a issue
Why don’t you just try it?
If I create a new session and add 24 Tracks, Ardour 5.12 uses about 400MB of RAM here in quick test (that’s on Intel x86_64 though), no FX, just recording and playing. This is also with default 10 sec buffers (Preferences > Audio)
I don’t know how much overhead the Desktop env etc on the Pi needs,…
I don’t have a raspberry pi 3 to test, if I had one I would of known by now what works and what not. But thanks for your reply.
Alright, very interesting. I read many times that for audio purposes, we had to chose the CPU that has the best performance per thread, as most of audio tasks can’t be multithreaded. Could Flac enconding be handled by other threads while the main audio thread records or process? That would change the way we choose hardware.
Ardour already is massively multithreaded, read/writing disk data already takes place in an entirely different thread from audio processing. Ardour will use all the cores available (subject to your control) to parallelize signal processing. The only sense in which this affects hardware choice is “more cores are better (mostly)”.
All that being said, using any CPU cycles for one thing means they are not available for something else. So the CPU vs. disk storage tradeoff still exists.