Maybe a way of multitrack recording on zynthian

https://ecasound.seul.org/ecasound/

Just wanted to keep this on the radar, this might allow us to record into multiple tracks when recording in the zynthian.

Lossless compression on the fly might trade-off bottlenecks, perhaps if there was an idle core, one forum observation:
“With FLAC you’ll gain about 20 to 40% in size, but you can only use REAPER (the only known DAW to record to FLAC)”
A test of Reaper on a Raspberry Pi 4 might provide a point.

Another reference point is this article on recording, using a 4Mb Pi 4, running a 64 bit system, recording to an SSD drive. It suggests reliable multi track recording might not just a matter of dropping in a plugin.

I did some work a while ago on a multitrack recorder on the Pi. The main constraint seemed to be the write speed of the flash drive. I may resurrect that code for Zynthian. I don’t think we necessary need a full DAW. We already have the plug-in system. Some more routing and maybe mixing and a recorder module and we could have quite a useful tool.

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there is a great perl project called “nama” which makes use of ecasound to build a complete multitrack DAW from the command line !
If it is not usable as is in Zynthian, maybe it can serve as an inspiration. you can ask the current maintainer Joel Roth, he can tell you more.

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Not sure if already a feature, but is recording one channel at a time while playing back some already recorded audio from another channel possible?
Even with only 2 stereo or 4 mono channels, that would be quite amazing to have a zynthian box for piecing together some musical ideas easily.