does it work with N
To my surprise, I could not find anything about this in the forum…
Has anybody tried running N-Track on an Asus EeePC?
I’m considering an Eee PC 901 myself. If N would run on it, I’d probably go with the XP version. That would be really neat.
Flavio, if you see this, what is your opinion?
Otherwise I’d go with Linux for faster boot-time and a more light-weight OS.
Model comparison chart at http://event.asus.com/eeepc/comparison/eeepc_comparison.htm
I.T.
Call me doubting Diogenes… but I’d lay a heavy wager n wouldn’t work. Why? n’s process footprint is too big. For example, I have the same project, same FX, same wave files to use in testing DAW’s. n-Tracks “footprint” for this project is almost 93 Megabytes. Contrast this to Reaper which works great on the Eee PC. It consumes only 43 Megabytes. This is important because the Eee PC doesn’t have a hard disk, it’s all solid state storage and in a limited amount.
You could try n-Track and if it doesn’t work, try Reaper. It will run in WinXP or Linux under WINE/Alsa. Although the guys I know running it on the Eee are using WinXP.
D
PS There are many other reasons I doubt it will work but I don’t have time to dig into them right now…
Your memory footprint seems excessive for just n-Tracks. It’s just above 24 megs on my machine. Footprint depend on the project. To blindly say the footprint is N-megs without mentioning what the project contains is an ambiguous statistic. Also, to compare it to Reaper is just as ambiguous because the initial buffering isn’t taken into consideration. (yes, I know you said for the project…see below.)
That said, memory footprint is a consideration and for Reaper to start with just 43 megs when n-Tracks starts with 93 megs exposes that n-Tracks needs more at startup for a given project.
I’ve got a project that has 731 megs of waves in it. When n-Tracks starts up the memory footprint goes up to 47 megs. When it playing the memory used goes up to 123 megs, when buffering is Normal (Default).
By adjusting the buffering I can get the footprint, while playing, as low as 60 megs.
Effects in the projects will affect memory footprint as well. As long as the exact same effects are in use then a comparison can be made. It would be better if there were no effects, including those that are on by default in n-Tracks.
As for the Eee PC, that model has only 20 gigs of storage and 1 gig of memory. I totally agree with D. Both system memory and storage will be an issue unless you put in another hard drive. The OS will use much/most of the 1 gig (mine is using about 1.3g of 2g total when running n-Tracks and the browser right now), but much of the 20 gigs will go to the OS and any other apps installed. It won’t be long before you’re out of space. If your system if close to requiring virtual memory, as would be the case for me if I had only 1g physical RAM, then there goes even more the 20g in the system drive.
Wow… it seems Asus have upped the ante a bit… You can get the Eee PC with an 80 GB SATA drive now!
Grab one of those and a neat little USB2.0 Audio/MIDI interface… SWEET. I betcha the HD model with 2GB of RAM would run n just fine**. You might run out of CPU horsepower if you tried to mix with a buncha FX but for a neat, SMALL and flexible portable recording rig, that jobbie would ROCK.
D
** Which means it’d fly like a bat out of hades with Reap! 
$650 for the 80GB Model on Newgg.com… G.A.S. attack… Meh… it might as well be $650,000… I can’t have one… pooches out lower lip
WAIT! Hmmm… Scheming, devious mind working I betcha I can get the day job to buy me one for “business” use… Hmmm…
D
Unless I read wrong 20g Eeee Storage is not 20g of flash on the machine. It’s 20g of free storage on the web. Seems the machine has 1g to work with and everything else is on the net. That would make it useless for anything that needs local/semi-fast storage.
The HD models are the only ones that could work for much of anything.
They also have a -more than ample- 8.9" display. Anyone with a 17" screen? Their display is about 1/4 the size.
No dice in my opinion, but I bet it’s nicer than a cell phone for browsing the net.
I’ll stick with my iPhone. It fits in my pocket. Don’t have any clothes with 8.9 inch pockets.
Obviously, it’s not a machine for serious mixdown. I was thinking more along the lines of a portable recording setup with USB2 audio-IO and perhaps an hardrive, too. Or as a musical scratchpad with just the onboard IO. Or as a small platform to run softsynths from.
Also, onboard RAM can be upgraded and it has a slot for SD-cards.
I.T.