Making Music With The Eee PC


Create Digital Music has been watching the Asus Eee PC closely. The laptop’s portable nature and low price-cheaper than a turntable-have made them desirable to both producers and performers. CDM has collected links to many people that are figuring out how to leverage the lightweight rig. [Dan Stowell] put together a tutorial for SuperCollider, the real time audio synthesis engine. The machine is good for simple text based tracker software too. On the Windows side, a lot of software, like Guitar Rig, can be enabled with just a little display driver hacking. This really makes us wonder when we’ll see the first Eee PC keytar mod.

10 thoughts on “Making Music With The Eee PC

  1. I personally use my EeePC for recording and live MIDI processing/monitoring, and any more exposure to it’s capabilities is great. One thing I would like to see is some sort of serial MIDI controller built into the case.

  2. i have my eepc setup btw 2 turntables with a standard keyboard mixer and midi keyboard along with a usb 7.2 sou round sound hub thx to my bud at raves unlimited

  3. Not only for audio, also audio/video works great! I’ve performed as a VeeJay using fluxus and jack on my Eeepc-701, with a great result on high resolution projectors via external VGA, performing a FFT analysis of sound and 3d rendering of polygons all real-time, believe it or not :) to reach low-latency with jack the eeepc sound card needs to be opened with the following settings: jackd -p128 -dalsa -r44100 -p2048 -n4

  4. I followed his instructions for installation and it didn’t work. I have advanced mode enabled and maybe that had something to do with it. But anyway, I’m restoring from backup. Too much for my tiny brain to comprehend. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.

  5. I saw that last comment months ago and it’s been gnawing at me for ages. I’m going to go ahead and make myself a keytar with the guts of an EEE PC 900, a Carillon Control 49 and possibly some portable speakers to make it more truly portable.
    With an eeepc 900 +touchscreen in the case, it’ll be more like a Roland V-Synth in terms of sound potential because I have Reason installed (although not as powerful)!
    Big ambitions, but I’ve got plenty of time.

  6. Hope some DAW lovers catch this… Am using a stock acer ascpire d250 and have managed this:
    -6 polyphonic midi synths with 2-3 instances of each.
    -12 percussion samples @1-2mb each
    -6 guitar samples @500k-1.5mb each
    -EQ on each channel
    -flanger/wah on each guitar channel
    -ozone on master channel
    NO cracklin’s going on through out the entire 4.5 minute mixdown

    Software/hardware used?:
    -SonicFoundry ACID 4.0e
    -Audacity 1.3.8
    -izotope ozone 4
    -a1ctl v0.4 (for resizing screen 1024×768)
    -optional Asio4all 2.x for realtime recording
    -Alesis io\2 soundcard/input
    This all works.. and should really make you smile when you see what you can do with these little computers. Toss in one of the new Akai lpk25 mini midi keyboard and you’re gonna make heads turn!

  7. i have ableton running on a dell mini nickelodeon edition netbook and it runs fine with emulated chip sounds and the like but once i start using sound that are more complex it starts to freeze etc would this be fixable by simply adding another gig of RAM? just so i know before i go buy some and it doesn’t work

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