Flowstone as a hardware music synth

[mockba]

Hello there.

I am planning to use Flowstone (yes, not Synthmaker) to write my "hardware synth".
The idea is to have a fanless barebone computer running a very light version of Windows Xp or 7, asio4all and a Flowstone EXE loaded on the startup.bat.
I plan to use flowstone because I want this computer to have no screen, but communicate to the external world via a LCD display and a few knobs. Just like any other synth.
Question is: does anyone here have experience running Flowstone (or Synthmaker) on one of those fanless computers? especially regarding to latency?
I see that there are some good Atom based fanless barebones, but I fear they would not have enough CPU power to drive a good latency.

Any help is appreciated.

Cheers,
Marcelo.

[Embedded]

I've used various Embedded PC Systems with FlowStone.

The Atom ones are great for control applications but are just not powerful enough to do lots of DSP or music synthesis! Also the Fan less Atoms are not fan less! For sure the CPU has no fan but in the box you need two or three fans to keep the box cool!

I would go for a mini Itx with a proper dual or quad core Intel CPU!

Also if you don't require a screen keyboard or mouse you should consider Windows Embedded Standard. For what you need the OS would be around 300K and boot in less than 10s!

I know DSPRobotics are making a Windows Embedded system using an Atom board:

http://www.dsprobotics.com/embedded.html

Maybe they could make you something more powerful too? I'd drop them an email at least.

[mockba]

Hi Embedded,

Thanks for the reply.
I have been doing some research before I put my $$$ on anything, as latency would of course be a major issue.
A friend of mine will test a Flowstone synth on a dual core atom embedded he has, if it proves reliable I may decide for that.
Otherwise I will have to move towards the Core2duo or quad. And I will research also on Windows Embedded, thanks for the tip.

In the meantime there's a chance that someone has already tried the same and would share the results here.

And of course if it works for me I'll let everyone know.

Cheers,
Mockba.

[Embedded]

One other thing I forgot to mention was I wouldn't recommend using ASIO4ALL in a commercial product. It works fine to play with, but it doesn't always start with your hardware selected. So you could end up with no sound!

Plus if you use the Enterprise or Pro version of FlowStone you get proper ASIO support with Low latency!

[mockba]

Hi Embedded,

I think that even using the ASIO support from inside Flowstone you would still need an underlying ASIO driver, right?
So I guess the ASIO modules of Flowstone (and Synthmaker) would talk to the driver first (Asio4All in my case).

Isn't that it?

Cheers,
Mockba.

[Embedded]

Not quite, ASIO4All converts the Direct Sound (DS) drivers from the hardware into ASIO drivers for ASIO only software.

Since FlowStone has DS in, there is no advantage in converting them, just use the DS In. Also ASIO4ALL doesn't reduce the latency of DS drivers as they are still running!

Most audio hardware for music has native ASIO drivers where you can adjust the latency to be very low, which is one of the major advantages of ASIO, plus the drivers are sample accurate across all channels so there are no phase issues when using multi channel audio.

I use the Tascam US-122 and Tascam US-1641 for my audio hardware, these both have ASIO drivers and work well with FlowStone!

[mockba]

Understood.

But some magic is happening here, I don't know how:
If I quickly build a simple synth using the DS module as the output, I have some latency, which I would say would be around 15 to 20 milissecs (by feeling).
However, if I just delete the DS module and plug in the Asio module, I get close to no latency, not only when I select Asio4All driver from the module, but also when I select the generic ones from Cubase.
Somehow using ASIO gives me close to no latency at all, and my audio is the regular sound from the laptop, no ASIO capable hardware there.
However I don't see where in the DS driver I would be able to tune some buffer size or something like that to reduce its latency.
I understood your explanation that Asio4all (or the Cubase driver) should be an added layer on top of the native DS driver, and they should at least not increase the DS latency, but in fact they are reducing it.
So I don't think they're just acting as an adapter to accomodate ASIO based software.

Go figure ...

Cheers,
Mockba.

[alphaOri]

I know this was an old thread, but I was wondering if the OP ever got this working well. I am interested in also building a hardware synth using Flowstone and Windows Embedded but I'm not sure what type of specs I'd need for the hardware. The Fit-PC solution that DSP Robotics offers is crazy expensive. I also saw a beagleboard which runs Windows Embedded.

[MyCo]

FlowStone requires a x86 CPU with SSE instruction set. The cheapest chance for this is an Intel Atom, Celeron or AMD A-Series board. For audio you can use anything that Windows supports. For low latency stuff you would require a sound card that has its own ASIO Driver (Asio4All is not an option).

[alphaOri]

Thanks for the info. What about the new Galileo using the Quark processor? I realize I'd still need a sound card. http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ ... board.html