Some experiences getting a software-based music system working

After a week of pain and suffering, largely my own fault, I believe I
have my system reasonably stable. I'd like to share a couple of
observations with you in case anyone else feels like going this way.

The idea: I have a laptop, why not use it for music making. (not
exactly an original idea, but certainly an attractive one)

The laptop isn't state of the art but it is a PIII 850 HP Omnibook
with 384M memory which seems adequate if not cutting edge.

What I ended up with:-

I used NI's Kompakt sampler as the main instrument, and the DAW
software is Cubase VST 5. The sound is provided by an external USB1
Edirol UA20. The main disk storage is an external USB2 Lacie 80G 7200
drive. This is connected via a Belkin dual port USB2 PCMCIA card.

I also have an Akai MPD16 drum pad.

Main points

1. Cubase will quite stably record and playback 16 audio tracks at 16
bit 44.1KHz using the external USB2 drive as the audio storage device.

2. The measured disk usage at this point was around 60% as reported by
Cubase. I compared this to the internal 20G 4200rpm laptop drive and
got almost identical figures. From this I conclude that USB2 is a
perfectly viable and definitely cheaper alternative to upgrading the
laptop drive. (at GBP120 for the external drive compared to quite a
lot more for a comparable laptop drive)

3. I installed a clean copy of Win2K pro to a dedicated partition but
installed all the music software to the external Lacie drive (but put
drivers for things like the UA20 on the laptop drive).

4. I had audio glitches if I disabled hardware acceleration on the
laptop graphics. This is contrary to some advice on the net which
recommends doing this.

5. The system seems pretty stable so far. Previously I had installed
the software over an existing Win2K installation that had gathered a
fair amount of cruft over the years; this was definitely NOT stable.
Using Kompakt stand alone I can get 5ms latency. This is asking
slightly too much of Cubase when I then use Kompakt as a VST plugin,
and then I need to increase the UA20 buffer another notch, giving 9ms
latency.

6. Don't EVER buy a PCMCIA USB2 card that uses the Ali chipset. You
will experience great pain and suffering. Make sure it uses the NEC
chipset. (I subsequently bought a Belkin card which was cheap and
works well)

7. If you are plugging any powered device (e.g my Akai MPD16 or the
UA20) into the PCMCIA card, you NEED to plug in the supplied external
power supply. Otherwise things don't work properly. In many cases the
device isn't even recognized. This is despite the fact that the
current drain (around 200ma) is well within the 0.5A you are supposed
to be able to draw from a USB port - probably this is some kind of
PCMCIA thing.

8. Which means, don't buy a PCMCIA USB2 card that doesn't come with a
plug in power supply. Some don't.

9. I experimented with the advice that it might be worth installing
the APM HAL rather than ACPI. I now disagree with this advice. The
registry tree with APM installed is radically different and software
and drivers don't always cope with this. I think ACPI (the default) is
a better choice.

10. Kompakt playing the demanding PMI Bosendorfer 290 piano sample set
can manage at least 30 notes polyphony at around 50% CPU usage. Note
that the samples as supplied are 24 bit 48KHz. I used the freeware
product r8brain to resample these to 16 bit 44.1KHz which took a
couple of hours to run but I cannot tell the audible difference and
the load on the system is a *lot* less. (sorry Michiel if you're
reading this, I know you wanted the samples to be of pristine
quality....)

PS: The Akai MPD16 is the most wonderful gadget I have bought for
ages. At last, a proper 16 pad velocity sensitive drumpad for a
reasonable price. It is really marvellous fun. Buy one!. A
particularly nice feature is that when connected via USB it looks like
a MIDI source directly; no need to wire it in to your MIDI in. Nice
touch, Akai.

PPS: Kompakt still has some quirks although it is reasonably stable.
It is a very good software sample playback option, though, especially
at the price.