Ardour on a repurposed Chromebook?

I have a spare Acer Chromebook C720. I love my Chromebooks/box/base, but there isn’t a way to record MIDI tracks.

I’m coming from Garageband. I’m considering a few options:

  • Buy a cheap old Macbook
  • Buy a cheap PC and try Mixcraft
  • Wipe ChromeOS from the Chromebook, replace it with a lightweight Ubuntu distro, upgrade the SSD size and try Ardour

Any thoughts about using Ardour on the Chromebook? This one has an Intel Celeron 2995U 1.4GHz processor and 2GB of RAM. Do you think some simple MIDI recording and arranging would work OK?

Well, MIDI arranging would likely be fine is my guess. However if you plan on using much in the way of synths or samplers, you will start running into problems, as I doubt it will keep up with much in the way of processing. So yes you can write and compose on it, but listening to it could be a different issue depending on what you try to do.

  Seablade

Hi brianshrader - my thoughts on using Ardour on a Chromebook with 2GB of RAM.
2GB is enough memory to run a lightweight Linux desktop and maybe one application which is not memory hungry. I have a desktop PC here and I use KDE 4.
The operating system, desktop and a single instance of the Chromium web browser total about 4GB in memory (but I have enough memory to deliberately push most of the operating system and applications into the memory. 20GB.)
2GB is a very small amount of memory (most new smart phones have that amount of RAM now) and once the memory becomes full, the operating system swaps out memory to disk. Lots of memory to disk swapping is not something you want happening on a system which you want to use for low latency MIDI operation.
If you can upgrade the memory on the Chromebook, consider doing that.
The on-board audio device of the Chromebook will not support running jack at latencies low enough to be considered practical for professional (or even amateur IMO) use.
You would be wise to buy also a usb audio device to go along with the Chromebook (or any mobile computing device you want to manipulate audio on.) A usb audio (or even firewire) device should support low enough latencies to be useful. Especially for MIDI sequencing using jack MIDI; if you plan to use an input device such as a usb MIDI keyboard.

I can see the attractiveness of being mobile, however unless you purchase a machine with at least 4GB (I would lean more towards 8GB though,) you are going to be fighting with the machine until you eventually get slightly below average performance out of it for your use case. You will probably then save and buy something to improve upon it or give up entirely eventually.

My recommendation is to build a desktop PC suitable for media production. Something like the The Media Lite listed on : https://www.reddit.com/r/PCMasterRace/wiki/builds which uses these parts : http://pcpartpicker.com/p/pP76dC double the memory and add an ALSA supported usb or PCIE (PCI express) sound card and you will end up with a system which will allow you to do MIDI sequencing at low enough latencies using jack and Ardour.
You would of course install Linux. And if you are new to Linux; possibly Ubuntu Studio (I personally use Fedora but I would not recommend Fedora to new users.)

If you want to run Mixcraft or [Insert proprietary DAW/MIDI sequencer here] instead of Ardour, you would still require more than 2GB of RAM but you may purchase a software product which is more polished than Ardour. Mixcraft, Ableton Live, Cubase, Tractor, Fruity loops or Adobe Audition are not cheap or open source.

So to be as helpful as I can : I would not describe any MIDI sequencing as simple (unless you just want to click a mouse on an on screen grid… lol) because it requires as low as possible latency when using input devices. Ardour and jack will run on the hardware you have listed but obtaining more powerful hardware is highly recommended if you want to record using MIDI hardware.

For MIDI it should be good…

I disagree with TW… MIDI is not very resource hungry. The big question is, are you using MIDI to drive external synths, or software synths… If it is external, then you should have no problem at all.

I have an Acer c720, I picked up cheap for use as a web browser e.t.c., but also terminal machine, remote X and some lightweight duties for maintaining my headless server and media PC’s at home (all gentoo). …

I have installed Xubuntu using crouton and it seems reasonably snappy…
2GB is not great but should be viable, even for some audio recording, but maybe not plugins. Remembering, years ago I was happily running Cakewalk on a 300Mhz machine with 256 MB of RAM. Then my next desktop was a 2.4 GHz single core Pentium IV with yep… 1 GB of RAM, it could do audio okay… plugins weren’t a thing in those days. The Atom in the c720 is more powerful than that old chip though.

Happy to test installing kxstudio packages.
It would be worth considering using Rosegarden or MusE for MIDI… or Non-Sequencer (insert suitable MIDI sequencer here)… if you aren’t using audio.

I will even give Bitwig a go on this machine, I have seen reports of it working okay on a c720.

allank I think you missed my points. The use of MIDI hardware instruments requires low latency handling of MIDI messages in order to achieve useful results. Operating systems are resource hungry.
Operating systems and software applications can easily consume more than 2GB of RAM and when they do so, it hinders low latency operation and can attribute to the generation of xruns.

There is much more than just one big question to answer here and what about driving soft synths using external MIDI hardware whilst using Ardour to record the MIDI data?
kxstudio has KDE 4 as the primary desktop which is very memory hungry.

I stand by my opinion that a combination of 2GB of RAM and an on board sound chip will produce below average results in combination with jack and Ardour.
I think the ALSA midi sequencer and rosegarden are a more suitable combination than jack and Ardour if low latency operation is unimportant.

I think the ALSA midi sequencer and rosegarden are a more suitable combination than jack and Ardour if low latency operation is unimportant.

Unless things have REALLY changed since I last used Rosegarden(And a quick google suggest they haven’t), I would strongly disagree. Especially when considering that Rosegarden loads in the entire KDE libs, which can be quite memory intensive, so yes if this is the setup you are running on a full fledged KDE desktop, I would imagine you are running into problems running out of ram.

I have used Rosegarden and Ardour both on low spec’d hardware, you have to be careful with what you do, and certainly don’t want to run a full KDE or really even Gnome desktop, and likely wouldn’t want to use Ubuntu Studio for that reason. Personally I would probably even look at other options as well beyond just those two pieces of software. In as far as desktops most people use very lightweight desktops to save on memory, such as LXDE, or Fluxbox (Which I ran when I used Ardour and Rosegarden on old <500Mhz machines with 512 MB of Ram). I currently run e17 myself on my workstation and am happy with it, but even that I would want to test and compare to see if it is usable on a Chromebook, it may be.

Yes MIDI monitoring can require low latency absolutely, or if, as Allank suggested, you are using external synths, you can utilize MIDI-Thru and MIDI merge boxes etc. to easily negate this need. Means more hardware, but is a possibility. If going the soft-synth route you will need to be careful about which synths you try to use. Using a sampler that loads in hundreds of instruments into memory probably just isn’t going to work. Using a basic synth to do the basic idea forming and lay down some beginning tracks you continue to work on on a full fledged workstation later if you need other synths is likely perfectly doable.

By the way, KxStudio is an option as external repositories on other distributions, I use it myself on Bodhi Linux for instance.

   Seablade

I didn’t say to install the kxstudio OS, but that I was going to install the repos to do some quick testing on the machine I have (on it right now)

I’ve downloaded the kxstudio repos and am using Xubuntu (btw, I’m typically a gentoo with fluxbox user, so you don’t need to explain the merits of lighweight desktops)… running under crouton, ardour loaded with 16 audio tracks and 16 MIDI tracks still had just under 500MB of physical RAM left… Hydrogen had around 700 MB physical RAM spare with a full drum kit loaded.

This is under crouton, so a proper dual boot system would have less overheads making an Acer c720 a viable system. Not fantastic… For about 60 USD you can add a 128GB M.2 drive and then getting a decent USB interface would be money well spent…

For getting started, I would actually argue that this is a reasonable system.
I and quite a few people I know have all released music made on much older systems with significantly less RAM. (the 90’s were an interesting time). I’ve always had MIDI hardware and understand the importance of solid timing. I also understand that a badly chosen motherboard can be more detrimental than RAM limitations.

Sure this is not an ideal system, but if you are just starting or on a tight budget and already have one of these machines, it can’t hurt to give it a crack. (My studio machine is a core i7 4930k, and I can still see myself using this as an ideas pad)

BTW installing kxstudio, is still okay… You can switch to a lighter WM, however the kxstudio version of kde4 is very stripped back, has an optimised low latency kernel and for a new user is a great way to get started… Alternatively installing xubuntu or Mint with XFCE and then installing the kx repos are another good option.

I agree with the point about the onboard sound chip a decent USB interface with MIDI is very important, and I also feel that ardour might not be the best tool for the OP’s needs, but the Acer c720, is not a bad platform to explore with.

btw I just loaded up BITWIG and still have over 600 MB of free RAM, My MPC 2500 has only 128 MB sample RAM and some very small amount for the OS to use… My feeling that this would be a useable machine is increasing.

i agree with seablade… Rosegarden is pretty heavy…

It really depends on what Brianshrader wants to do musically as to what the best tool would be.

I am of the opinion starting with the cheapest option (in this case doing a minor upgrade. I would personally go with the cheapest option, which is upgrade the m.2 ssd drive on the acer and play around with a linux OS … The easiest option being a lightweight Debian based OS and then installing the kxstudio packages… Many software options to explore there.

All of the options would require a USB audio interface for Audio and MIDI… but there is no harm on starting with the internal audio while trying to choose or save up.

The operating system, desktop and a single instance of the Chromium web browser total about 4GB in memory

I’m not familiar with Chromebook, but that surprises me - are you counting cache memory in that? I ran Ardour 0.99 for quite a while with large multitrack sessions on 1GB of RAM. My 64-bit Linux desktop PC with Iceweasel running (on which I’m typing this post) is using less than 800MB out of its total of 2GB. My current DAWs have 4GB of RAM, but I rarely use more than a quarter of that despite high track and plugin counts. It is possible to run a DAW with a modest amount of RAM, as long as you don’t want to use a bloated desktop or make heavy use of virtual instruments.

@jrigg

That number is running KDE desktop etc on full Linux I believe, not chromeos.

That number is running KDE desktop etc on full Linux I believe, not chromeos.

Ah, that could explain it. I haven’t used Gnome or KDE for years due to their unacceptable (by me) consumption of system resources. A relevant question could be “can I use my DAW system to run a mega-bloated desktop environment?” :wink:

coming from garageband I’m guessing he’s not having extremely large track counts. It of course varies a lot by what you are doing, but I’ve done all of my recordings to date with 2GB of ram (using xubuntu with kx-repos). This is sequencing drums, a few soft synths, and everything else recorded audio. I’d be a bit more worried about the CPU limit at only 1.4Ghz (my laptop is dual core 2.6Ghz). If he’s doing a lot of processing on the tracks while mixing he might get xruns a lot, but I suppose he can just have high latency to offset that while mixing. But the bottom line is it depends on how he’s using it. I’d recommend he boot AVLinux live and try some stuff and decide.

Especially when considering that Rosegarden loads in the entire KDE libs, which can be quite memory intensive, so yes if this is the setup you are running on a full fledged KDE desktop, I would imagine you are running into problems running out of ram.
i agree with seablade.. Rosegarden is pretty heavy..

Sorry guys; the only similarity between KDE and rosegarden is that they are both built using the QT tool kit. No KDE dependencies other than QT are required. rosegarden consumes approximately 27MB of memory which is not much at all and QT has been found to be extremely useful by the folks who built razorqt desktop, which is now http://lxqt.org/ as the primary tool in which to use to build a light weight desktop.

can I use my DAW system to run a mega-bloated desktop environment?
I enjoy my sub pixel hinting, properly themed and managed windows, bluetooth management, network management, colour management, power management, syntax highlighted code editor and well designed file manger. It seems pretty standard to me and I think mega-bloated desktop is a very poor choice of words. I built my system specifically to run KDE 4 as my default desktop instead of purchasing the cheapest laptop I could find and I enjoy all the benefits it brings.

And yet I still find myself still not agreeing that doing any kind of audio work on a 1.4GHz 2GB laptop with on an board sound card is a useful exercise.

@TW It used to not be so if that is the case. But it appears you are correct in that KDE libs are completely removed from build requirements now. So that could be a significant improvement.

That being said, my suspicion is that the 27 MB number may be a little off, not saying you don’t see it but my first question is, does that include the shared libs used by Rosegarden or not?

Now keeping my above comments about memory in mind, in as far as desktop environments, here is the first comparison of memory usage article I found, and is almost recent at least being about 2 years old, so it could be out of date…

You will notice that by default razorqt was a bit heavier than other DEs mentioned here, but the second part of that article does mention you can switch it to run on top of openbox instead of kwin which apparently gives a significant boost in using less memory.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have programmed in Qt before, and I don’t think it is bad, especially not compared to Qt3 etc. Qt4 is a significant step forward, and I haven’t played with Qt5 to be able to comment there, but with their focus a bit more on mobile types I would expect good improvements in memory usage.

It is also worth noting that even on Rosegarden’s site they acknowledge it can be fairly resource hungry…
http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/getting/requirements/

Any modern desktop or laptop and most netbooks should have sufficient processing power and RAM to meet Rosegarden's minimum requirements. However, Rosegarden is fairly memory-hungry, and can demand a lot of processing power, so the more you can throw at it, the more enjoyable your experience will be.
... and pretty well echo what has been said in this thread...
Editing, playing and recording MIDI and editing score are less resource-hungry than recording or playing audio. The use of multiple audio plugins or soft-synths will especially impact system performance.

Now I am not saying Ardour can’t be resource hungry as well, just that by default I find it a bit less so than Rosegarden personally, but I haven’t gone through the entire process of measuring both Rosegarden and Ardour in a non-qt and non-gtk environment, though I suppose since I run e17 it wouldn’t be to difficult to do, in a similar fashion to the original article I posted on memory usage, actually measuring the free memory after loading each. Obviously that doesn’t take into account swap if any is paged out, but I should be able to disable swap for testing purposes most likely if needed.

But frankly I consider that to be a lot of work for not much benefit honestly.

  Seablade
I enjoy my sub pixel hinting, properly themed and managed windows, bluetooth management, network management, colour management, power management, syntax highlighted code editor and well designed file manger. It seems pretty standard to me and I think mega-bloated desktop is a very poor choice of words.
I did use a smiley. I appreciate that many users enjoy the convenience of a fully featured desktop. I personally prefer to use a lightweight window manager. That doesn't prevent me from having a syntax-highlighted editor (vim) or a well designed file manager (mc and xfe). I don't change network/power/colour settings very often, so I'm quite happy using the command line or text file configuration to do so. On my own DAW systems the priority is audio and anything else that encroaches too much on that doesn't get installed.

I do realise that not everyone has the luxury of using a dedicated DAW, but I still think there must be something wrong when a desktop plus web browser is consuming 4GB of memory.

that seems a bit weird… with my kxstudio environment… I very rarely get to 4GB out of my 16GB of RAM on that machine… And the stats I showed earlier (although using xfce) the OS and browser running as well as chromeOS running behind it with another browser barely push 1GB

I do realise that not everyone has the luxury of using a dedicated DAW, but I still think there must be something wrong when a desktop plus web browser is consuming 4GB of memory.
There is nothing wrong with a desktop system consuming huge amounts of memory if it is by design. When I wrote "I have enough memory to deliberately push most of the operating system and applications into the memory." I wasn't kidding. This includes directories which may normally be mounted as file systems on hard disks such as the /tmp directory which instead is deliberately mounted as tmpfs (a memory file system.) If you don't reboot the system for a few days (or completely flush the memory any other way) 4GB of data in a temporary folder as the result of a lot of web browsing or audio work is perfectly normal. If that folder is in tmpfs, that is likely where the big number is coming from. It currently sits at about 2.6GB total. So it must not have been rebooted in a while.

What I was attempting to do was to compare my situation where I have more memory than I use with a system which has enough memory to run a desktop environment, an x server, a single application and not much else. I was attempting to make the point that a more powerful system is so much less frustrating to work with than an underpowered one and that it is worth taking the time to obtain a more powerful system.

my suspicion is that the 27 MB number may be a little off, not saying you don't see it but my first question is, does that include the shared libs used by Rosegarden or not?
I have programmed in Qt before, and I don't think it is bad, especially not compared to Qt3 etc.
Don't you mean : does that include the memory total of x number of objects created using linked libraries at runtime by rosegarden? If so; I have no idea what x is. From what I can tell most of the UI is drawn once the application is loaded. In a typical session, qt may never be used to create anything further than is initially drawn. In that case the memory total of x number of qt objects is zero plus however much of 27MB already contains qt objects.

Uh I would be surprised if they were only using Qt for drawing sorry. Qt is quite often used for it’s signal/slot notification system among other aspects, and while yes UI drawing is part of Qt, the logic and memory of the libraries it provides goes far beyond just that. So I mean far more than just that.

Seablade
Uh I would be surprised if they were only using Qt for drawing sorry.
Best thing to do is always to check. http://svn.code.sf.net/p/rosegarden/code/trunk/rosegarden/src/ They have separated the base and the UI by the looks of it.
qt may never be used to create anything further
I have quoted myself because making any assumptions that qt is or is not being used for anything further with out looking at the source code is nothing but guess work. I can see that rosegarden has a dependency on qt when it is installed and that it is drawing qt style widgets when it has initialised. There is no reason for me to assume anything else without confirming it by investigating the source code.

This discussion seems to have moved away from the OP’s question:

Any thoughts about using Ardour on the Chromebook? This one has an Intel Celeron 2995U 1.4GHz processor and 2GB of RAM. Do you think some simple MIDI recording and arranging would work OK?
I see no mention of using the system for heavy web browsing for days at a time, just simple audio and MIDI use. I'd say it would work OK, with some reservations about a 1.4GHz CPU being adequate for low-latency work (plugin use would be somewhat restricted). The amount of memory is also fine IMO, as long as only light use of virtual instruments and samples is required.

The OP already has the machine, so it’s not going to hurt to try it (preferably with a decent interface).