posted 26 March 2009 19:43            

I would like to share my experience about using a small computer with Kyma.

Because I wanted to take my Pacarana on tour with some guitar gear, I needed a very small configuration to help me travel light. For the keyboard, I have chosen the Novation XIO keyboard (2 octaves), which includes a built-in USB Audio & MIDI interface. It is self powered, and just needs a USB cord for the whole duty.

The computer is a Lenovo Ideapad S10. It comes with a 10" screen (1024x600), Windows XP SP3, 4-in-one card reader, two USB ports, 2GB of RAM and a 80GB hard disk drive. There is also a VGA port, built-in microphone, webcam, a not-too-small keyboard. Most important: there is an ExpressCard port you can use to plug a FireWire card in.

I was surprised that the computer was not cluttered with all sorts of time-limited software. The only thing I had to uninstall was Norton SystemWorks, which I immediately replaced with F-Prot, a commercial anti-virus (30$/year) which has a very small footprint on the CPU. The system comes preinstalled with a nice backup utility which you will find useful if you want to make sure your data is not lost. (by the way this computer can also boot on the card reader which can be a nightmare saver)

For the connection with the Pacarana, I chose a Belkin FireWire card which has two FireWire 400 ports and a USB port. This one works very well with the Pacarana, because it is based on the Texas Instrument chip, which is mandatory when you want to do audio work. I had limited success with the Capybara, but luckily Kurt provided me with a solution, so now it works as well with the Capy. I will try a FireWire 800 ExpressCard that should provide better data transfer, but I don't expect dramatic improvements.

All my sounds and the Kyma distribution are stored on a fast 4GB SD card. I use this card to edit my sounds on the desktop machine which uses the Capybara. I will make a copy of this card in the event something wrong happens while on the road. I also copy the data on the internal hard disk from time to time. This is a convenient and secure way to store my work, at the price of a bit longer access times.

The computer is very nice to use but the CPU, albeit being a dual core architecture, is not as powerful as Core Duo based computers. However, running Kyma is not a problem. The screen size is more of a problem, so you have to make sure your VCS' are not too big. There's always the option to resize the VCS, so I had no problems editing my sounds while rehearsing, much of the work was done in the studio.

Everything fits well in the Tom Bihn bag (Pacarana, computer, keyboard and cables). That said, I am very happy with this computer, I am looking forward bringing all those new sounds on the stage!