Back in Febuary 2012 the first Raspberry Pi computer was released by the Raspberry Pi foundation. Designed by programmers and comuter designers who had grown up learning to code on old school PCs like he BBC computers in schools. These fantastic playing card size devices have been an amazing tool for learning and people have used them to creat everything from robots to weather measuring devices and pretty much anything else you can think of.
The latest version of the Raspberry pi is the most powerful yet and can easily work as a simple desktop computer. The Raspberry Pi 4 can come with up to 8gb of RAM which is easily enough to run a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).
This got me thinking…..
Could i record an audiobook on a raspberry pi??
Well in short..the answer is yes. The Pi 4 is powerful enough I think to do the job, but it also has another great attribute…the pi is silent and if you are recording with your computer in your studio then silence is golden.
There are drawbacks to the pi, however and the biggest is the lack of DAWs that will run on its Linux based OS. However there are a couple that do Ardour (i will be showing you how i used that), Audacity (many Narrators use this) and also Reaper have now released a Pi friendly version of their DAW. The other downside is that many of the Plugins available to MAC and PC users are not available on the PI. Having said that there is a pretty clever bunch of Open Source bods making some pretty good plugins. Check out Calf Studio Gear for a start.
However for the money and the sound of silence I thought it had be worth a go. ….
Yes but can i punch and roll?? With a Raspberry Pi?
Well in short…yes!
The pi also has one other thing going for it. It is very very GREEN. The power consumption is tiny compared to normal home computers. I love the idea of building a totally sustainable zero emissions recording studio one day and i think a few Raspberry Pi’s would be at the heart of it.