racked 'puter, portable recording

[JES]

Hi Folks,

 

Was reading the Laptop audio thread, and someone mentioned the portable PC in a rack case idea for mobile recording. It sounds like a great idea, but what about the monitor? Even a 15" job is heavy, clumsy and bulky. And LCD displays are still pretty expensive. One evil thought I had was to cannibalize the display from an old 486 laptop I have (it's small, probably 9" but I'd only be using it for tracking). The trick would be figuring out how to get video IN to the thing and bypass the computer itself.

 

So, what I want to know -- is anybody actually using a racked PC or Mac with (say) an 8-channel audio interface for portable recording? If so, how's it going?

 

Of course, in this age of firewire, someone could get a firewire computer, or something like an Imac and hit the road pretty quick with a firewire interface.

 

Best,

--JES

[videoeditor1]

Wait until Alesis brings out their 24trk, est street price $2000.00USD HDR

 

Or buy one of the other available units. The likelihood of a PC (or even MAC) crashing while recording is higher than using a stand alone, dedicated box.......

 

no monitor, no keyboard, no converters. Just plug & go.

[Sergievsky]

After dissecting my wife's Mac subnotebook 2400 several times I thought about using that lcd for the rack pc thing. The connector is some kind of ribbon cable so maybe an electric engineer can answer that problem...or if somebody actually makes some kind of converter for it.

 

How about it Craig? A DIY project specially for us loyal musicplayer members? http://www.musicplayer.com/ubb/cool.gif

 

Raul

[rumpelstiltskin.]

i'm the one who brought up the idea.

 

i use my computer to record, and i was looking into a rackmount case just to clean up my work area a while back when the idea struck me. i record with a guy who lives an hour away and moving my computer and setup piece by piece is a major hassle. so i was looking into putting the computer in a portable rack with some other gear and a drawer for some mics and the keyboard and mouse. maybe 8 or ten spaces, one rack, one monitor, not much hassle.

 

also, i don't have the money to buy a brand new laptop with a firewire interface so i can just track on that and then dump it into my home computer. that seems like a ridiculous waste of money, even if it boosts my editing productivity while on the road.

 

so that's how i arrived at the idea. it makes a lot of sense to me.

 

i am an electrical engineer, so i'd like to comment also about using a laptop display. while my first inclination is to say that the display probably uses an internal format, many laptops have some sort of video out capability for an external monitor, so it may well be the same format as any monitor, with just an internal format connection (ribbon cable) instead of a standard monitor cable.

 

in that case, all you'd need (just a guess) is a multimeter, an xacto knife, a soldering iron, and an adequate video connector to put the thing together properly. i can't say for certain, but if the laptop display uses a standard format, it shouldn't be too hard to correlate the lines on the ribbon cable to the pins on a video connector.

 

what i mean is that it would be more an issue of effort than of brain power. if you try it, good luck. i, myself, will be sticking with my current monitor. i'll let you know how it all works out when i finish tracking.