eee – Linux based “guitar”-Theremin effector
Here is my new say “project”. Looking for “cheap” multi-effect for my Theremin experiments I figure it out that what I do not like on computer based effect is the mouse interface. I thought it over and over and then found the small toy eee T91, a small PC with 1.33GHz processor and Touchscreen ;).
Although it’s hard to find it in a store I found one from second hand and went to install certain flavours of Linux. I have tried Ubuntu studio, then Debian, 64studio and then again Ubuntu studio I use still today (I thinking of Puppy, but I’m pretty much satisfied already).
Why I use Linux? First I like it and second with the Jack audio server I can have tiny mini delay even on this “slow”device and all the programs for free as well. Plus I can change the interface for my needs since it runs on Gnome and it’s easy to reconfigure. So it has for example such a huge sliders as you can see on the photo, without need to change a what ever program I choose… which uses the common GUI, indeed. What you can see here is a Jack audio server in the background with Jack Rack as the effector on top. It doesn’t eats the CPU that much as all others and has nice simple interface with countless effects. With such settings I have about 8.71 msec delay, I think it’s more then OK, when you thing of the way how Theremin works and what you can do with it, I think even for guitar is more then fine.
What is still in development are graphic drivers, I haven’t have time to look at and solve the way I like and frankly the built in sound card is not one of the best so there is still some noise. I think it has something to do with the Linux though, because when I switch to Windows it’s not “that” noisy. I have tried even my Zoom H4 as I sound card and the noise stays there so it seams to me the problem is kernel or something..indeed real-time in this case. And I’m not sure if I’ll go for on screen keyboard. I don’t think I really need it.
If you want to get rid of the potential hum, I never experienced with this eee you can always unplug it from DC and run it for next sweet 5 hours on battery ;]
If someone of you have any idea how to fix the noise, I’m one ear. An those who think of similar “project” the only thing I can recommend is think of a computer with better sound card. The rest is in this cute puppy more then OK…Right the screen response could be faster but I’m not going to draw on it.
