For the second unit I will be aiming to provide a central point to take my recorded audio and work on it across different machines at home.

In previous builds getting into the innards of the recording box to remove the portable SSD was difficult, as was getting at the lattepanda to connect it to my network.

In addition to this I also found myself mixing across different devices depending on where I was and what I was doing. Currently I have a laptop, mac mini, MS Surface and Windows gaming machine that I have Reaper installed on. Hopping between devices is a nightmare; each instance must be kept identical, which involves ensuring all instances have the same VST plugins and effects used in each project. I've tried centralising my content before on my home NAS, but that has given poor results as WiFi proves a bottleneck.

The proposal for the second unit it to turn the Zimaboard into a dedicated music server, complete with everything every device could need to edit.

I will create two fileshares:

Audio Projects - this will host the audio and project files for Reaper

VST plugins - this will be a central folder for all VSTs and plugins I use in my projects.

I will add both of these shares to all my machines so they can use them as a source.

I'd like to take advantage of the Zimaboard's dual 2.5G ethernet ports here, and connect via ethernet (using the device's ethernet ports or USB>2.5G ethernet dongles) to work from this central network setup without suffering from the problems I had with WiFi. All devices I use for mixing and editing connect to my home network via WiFi so all have that free ethernet port to use.

I will also create two VMs:

one will be a lightweight Debian headless VM for monitoring the network/s the unit is connected to. Upon detection of the other Zimaboard's MAC address being connected to it a sync will be triggered, ingesting any new projects and audio to the Audio Project fileshare.

For the second VM I'd like to create a full Windows/Linux desktop with Reaper installed, with access to the fileshares; I'd like to test whether remoting into the device and using the VM to mix and edit is feasible, as if it is it means I can remove my many instances across my machines and use the attached box as an all in one device.

Future improvements

The projects I edit aren't usually that VST-heavy; I tend to mostly prepare the recorded audio, comp together final takes, then send them to an audio engineer for mixing for release. However, for my own personal recording where I record guitars and vocals in addition to brass and use drum plugins it can get quite plugin-intensive.

One concern is how much the intel N150 CPU can handle before it would struggle with larger projects.

In order to help the CPU as much as possible I have been looking into DSP (Digital Signal Processing). Universal Audio create a fantastic array of Audio interfaces and PCI-e cards that work exclusively with their plugins and offload their processing to their own interface or PCIe card. The devices are expensive, as would be repurchasing Universal Audio versions of the effects I like to use, but doing so would be a great long-term investment. 

I believe this project would be great to demonstrate the power of this on-device DSP processing, so I have reached out to Universal Audio to see which of their interfaces or PCIe cards would be best for this. I believe the PCIe card may be the best fit, as it could fit in the footprint of the NAS enclosure and hopefully keep the audio coming from whichever device is running the VM.