The purpose for this setup to be taken out into the field to record rehearsals and gigs, store the raw audio and return it to be edited and mixed at home. 

The hope is that with a quick and easy recording setup it will not be a chore to mic up our rehearsals and gigs and yield a lot of raw audio, with that audio potentially being releasable. This will mainly be used with my 8-piece brass group, Small Town Brass, but will also be used with my other bands such as the Welfare Collective. The rig can also be used to record other band performances too on a freelance basis.

Hardware Outline

The Zimaboard will be mounted in its NAS Kit case, allowing two SSDs to be mounted in some 2.5" to 3.5" adaptors. In the future when looking to encase the Zimaboard and the mixer I may opt to move away from the kit's chassis and swap the two SSDs for a single external drive to keep space consumption down. I do hope to keep it on the chassis though, as the mounted bracket for PCI-e use is a great touch, and could be handy for future expansion.

The Behringer XR18 has two points of connection to the Zimaboard; firstly via USB to record the audio over, and secondly is via ethernet to allow for the mixer control software to interact with the mixer. The Zimaboard lacks native WiFi and I also do not want to waste resources on running a software Access Point on the SBC, so I will add a mobile router to the build. The mobile router has 2 ethernet ports so allows for the two devices to be connected. It also adds WiFi, so I can connect to the setup from my laptop, tablet or even phone to operate.

Software Outline

The Zima OS allows for VM and container use out of the box, so I am going to try using a combination of the two rather than wiping the OS and putting Windows or Linux on, although that remains an option should performance be impacted by using ZimaOS almost like a hypervisor.

Firstly I will setup a RAID array using the two mounted SSDs, and use these to store the captured audio. Secondly I will use ZimaOS to set up an Ubuntu VM and install my recording software of choice, Reaper, and the Behringer's mixer control software. Remoting into this VM will give complete control over the mixing and the recording all from one spot.

Reaper offers the ability to run a web interface with custom html, so I will aim to create controllers set to sit nicely on phone or tablet screens. 

In addition OSC is a fantastic protocol that can be used to control various aspects of the software too. There are several OSC apps (and an app for controlling the mixer called Mixing Station) available for android and iOS, so fully remoting into the VM may not be required.