As a musician and former soundman, I’ve typically had mixed feelings about the available PC-based software & hardware for music production. Since I’ve also worked in the business world a lot, my Windows-based computers have often been in the perpetual twilight of late adoption, i.e.: the latest software that finally incorporates features I want is so power-hungry that my system can’t run it. Ultimately, I’ll buy some quad-processor monster with terabytes of RAM and drive space, but in the short-term, I thought I’d try a little experiment: Set up a basic home-recording environment for less than a hundred dollars.

The first requirement is obviously that things be free whenever possible. That clearly limits the hardware a bit, so I’m using the discarded PC in the basement (most American homes have one, they’re right next to the un-recycled recycling and the rusty, dust-covered, low-priced home gym). This one is a Pentium III, 500Mhz, with 256MB of RAM (Woohoo! This baby can’t even run XP!). It has a 32MB “Soundblaster” audio card, and a 64MB “MadDog” video card. These must’ve been upgrades. The computer is a 20th Century relic, built in 1999. Since I can’t install XP, and can’t find a legit copy of Windows 2000, I’ve opted to try some kind of Linux solution.

After some quick research, I decided on two options:

1.) dyne:bolic
Why do Linux developers always have to put $p3(14£ (that’s leet for “special”) characters in their project names? dyne:bolic is a Linux distribution that is designed to run from a “live CD”, meaning you don’t actually have to install anything. Just download an ISO file and burn it to a CD. It’s optimized to run on slower computers, supposedly turning them into full media stations. They claim the minimum you need is a Pentium I or K5 PC with 64Mb RAM and a CD-ROM (it also will run on an XBox). It bundles a number of free multimedia applications including Xine, XMMS, Amorak, StreamTuner, Ardour, Audacity, Hydrogen, FreeJ, and MuSE.

2.) Ubuntu Studio
This is a full Ubuntu Linux operating system geared toward mulltimedia production. It comes bundled with many audio tools including: Ardour, Audacity, Hydrogen, JACK Audio Connection Kit, AMin, LilyPond, Mixxx, MusE, Rosegarden, and TiMidity++. None of the Ubuntu Studio resources I perused got too specific about system requirements, but basic Ubuntu has the same requirements as outlined above for dyne:bolic.

In the next piece, we’ll run through the basic install of dyne:bolic. First I have to make sure no organic life forms have taken up residence in the abandoned PC I’m going to use.