Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Kev06]

I've recently set up JRiver on the laptop, teamed with a xonar U7 usb soundcard. It acts as a music player for FLACs residing on a cheap wireless NAS setup, and also applies a stereo 3-way active crossover and EQ in the form of a linkwitz transform filter. Excellent results, very pleased  

However, in my case JRiver causes windows 10's start button to stop working, and its also annoying to have the laptop tethered with the audio out cabling. So I was thinking of getting a cheap ~10" atom tablet/laptop specifically to run JRiver instead. Possibly controlled over wifi by a JRiver installation on the laptop, haven't decided yet.

Would a modest atom laptop with 2gb of ram and running windows 10 be sufficient to do that?

Thanks
Kev

[mwillems]

I've recently set up JRiver on the laptop, teamed with a xonar U7 usb soundcard. It acts as a music player for FLACs residing on a cheap wireless NAS setup, and also applies a stereo 3-way active crossover and EQ in the form of a linkwitz transform filter. Excellent results, very pleased  

However, in my case JRiver causes windows 10's start button to stop working, and its also annoying to have the laptop tethered with the audio out cabling. So I was thinking of getting a cheap ~10" atom tablet/laptop specifically to run JRiver instead. Possibly controlled over wifi by a JRiver installation on the laptop, haven't decided yet.

Would a modest atom laptop with 2gb of ram and running windows 10 be sufficient to do that?

Thanks
Kev

Two points: 

1) The windows 10 start button issue is a known issue that's caused by several windows programs other than MC (steam and some adobe software will also cause it).  There's a long thread on it elsewhere on the forum. So it's a windows 10 bug that MC triggers, and changing computers will not fix it.  The easy workaround is to restart explorer and it will work again.

2) On the question of whether an atom is enough: If you're not doing convolution (only using PEQ to do the crossovers) an atom should be more than enough.  If you plan on using convolution to do the crossovers, depending on the length of the filters and the atom you're thinking of, you might or might not need something more powerful.  It really depends on how much real-time convolution you'd need to do. 

[glynor]

An Intel Compute stick would seem to fit the task even better. After initial setup, you wouldn't even need to hook it up to a display, and could just use Remote Desktop (or TeamViewer if you want it to be a bit fancier) to remote control and administer the system.

They have Atom versions which are quite cheap, and would be competitive with most Atom-based windows tablets:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9939/the-intel-compute-stick-cherry-trail-review
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1220968-REG/intel_boxstk1aw32scr_compute_stick.html

But, honestly, I'd strongly consider stepping up to the Core M version (which launches in early May, finally, after slipping from Feb), which will have much better performance with a Skylake CPU, 4GB of RAM (instead of 2), and more storage to boot:
http://www.engadget.com/2016/01/06/intel-compute-stick-core-m3-m5/
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1241480-REG/intel_boxstk2m3w64cc_compute_stick_core_m3.html

[Kev06]

Thanks for the answers! I'm not intending convolution so that sounds very encouraging, could be worth trying this, then :-)

Yeah I can accept that the start button issue may/will happen again if I go for win10, but that shouldn't matter as much on a dedicated music machine. Its when it happens to the laptop that I'm trying to work on that it gets annoying (there are other side effects too).

I realise that responsibility for this is an emotive issue, but as an end user its largely academic; the reality is that MS isn't fixing it and JRiver continues to trigger it so I have to deal with it either way. My entire OS isn't going to be changed in order to be more compatible with JRiver, but I like JRiver enough that I'd prefer not to drop it either - so thats why a cheap second machine looks like an answer.

Thanks for the suggestion of the compute sticks, they look like a good idea! The core M version will be too expensive for me (at least initially) but the atom versions are a fraction of the price so could be worthwhile.  I have no TV or monitor to use with the stick though, so that will take a bit of thought. It may be that a built in 10" screen could make things easier and more flexible as a stand-alone player.

Thanks again
Kev

[Kev06]

One thing I'd overlooked was that most of the little atom laptop/netbook/tablet affairs have very few USB ports - often just one. JRiver suggests it needs a second device as an input because for some reason it can't use the input on my USB soundcard at the same time as the outputs, and I didn't want to use a hub for a second input device or spend much to get a decent one.

However, it seems to be a software limitation not a hardware restriction. I installed voicemeeter (a virtual mixing application) which can listen to the existing soundcard's input and relay it to JRiver's ASIO line-in, appearing to JRiver as a different device (even though the sound is coming from the same old line in). At first I was slightly unhappy at having to fudge it like that, but actually it is working out very well because voicemeeter can also mix/switch a couple of other sources too, one of which can be any sounds from the laptop and its applications (such as youtube). Its a convenient pairing.

So this may work out even better than I'd imagined, with the little machine acting as a sort of receiver as well as media player and crossover.