Mini / Lightbridge as a back-up recorder?

[Chunky But Funky]

Well, I'm in the process of revising my business plan from rentals to a hybrid of rentals and remote recording. I'm setting things up with a modular approach.

Case 1 will have Mac Pro w/ RayDat, UPS, and 19" monitor.

Case 2 will have Mytek 8x 192, Forsell x2, Millenia x2 and DAV x4 with a Mac mini, m-audio profire lightbridge and 19" monitor. This will be for 2 to 8 channels stand alone rig for choirs, ensembles, etc. It will also be an 8 channel add-on for Case 1. Also allowing dual monitors if needed...or just for overkill. Having the Lightbridge also allows the benefit of Pro Tools M-powered to be run on the Mac Pro if anyone NEEDS Pro Tools compatibility.

Case 3 & 4 will both house RME ADI8 DS's with 8 channels each of various pre's. Cases 2, 3 & 4 will all allow a scalable system with the Mac Pro via lightpipe.

Long intro to the question: Would there be a big problem using the Mac Mini / ProFire Lightbridge combo for backup (of the full 24 channel Mac Pro rig)? I've read all the posts arguing dedicated hardware along the lines of an HD24 or Blackbox, but what's the chance of two simultaneous failures of concurrently running DAW rigs? I already have the Mini. ADAT lightpipe can be mirrored from all 3 converter boxes from aux. The Mini / Lighbridge has a small footprint (1 rack space) and will be in there anyway. I'm not thrilled about buying a product that's being discontinued either (hd24).

Whadda ya think?

Doug

[Gerax]

Hi

I'm not sure I completely understood your question, but I can tell you about my rig: it's based around a Lightbridge and in the last 2 years have solved my problem of monitoring the recording, PT compatibility and lightpipe distribution, in one little 1/2 rackspace...all this and proving to be stable and reliable.

My rig is arranged as this: I have ADAT equiepped pres (and 8ch ADAT converters for the analog pres). I pretty much record at 48KHz max so I use the S/MUX dual ADAT output to feed 2 independent digital recorders. The first one is the Lightbridge-PTMP-Dell Laptop combo, the second one is a Mackie SDR2496 HD recorder. Both recorders are fed the same exact digital signal from the pres (when I have to to 88.2 or 96 I use the parallel analog out in the pres to feed the Mackie). I also have everything WCed and MTCed so they completely stay in sync. I haven't had a single failure 'till now, so I'm pretty confident in saying it's a pretty stable rig; anyway, my last gig was a 40 piece orchestra I recorded with an additional Millenia HV3D going into an RME ADI8DS and the rest was the ISA and SPL pres I have in the rack. 18 tracks @ 24/44.1...1 and 1/2 hours of straight recording to a simple USB drive and the Mackie HD...went down without any issues.
Monitoring of the recording is via PTMP and the headphone amp in the Lightbridge, pretty convenient and allows me to forget a bulky hardware mixer.
The two recorders are independent, so that if the DAW crashes (and it never did) the other is unaffected and keeps going (MTC is only for the trigger start of recording, but for live gigs I tend to leave it freewheel).

Hope I gave you a good survey of how the Lightbridge works...

[Chunky But Funky]

Well, here is a pic of the rack I assemble for the Mac Mini / Lightbridge. The rack is a Raxxess UNS-1 and the Mac Mini mount is the Sonnet MacCuff. The Raxxess rack vent slots line up perfectly with the VESA 75 mount with slight widening with a drill bit. I attached it with the supplied screws and got some 4 mm dome nuts and a few washers. It turns out to be about 1 1/2 rack spaces and it should be ideally mounted on the bottom space as the bolt and nuts extend below the rack a bit. There may be a more elegant solution, but I'm going with this for now!

Doug

That cuff thing looks cool. I'm running a Intel Dual Core 2g with FW 400. I use a Newertech Mini Stack V2.5 as a usb hub and recording drive ONLY. My LB wouldn't run off the FW on the hub. This took a long time to figure out. M-Audio told me to try using a usb drive for recording. My Mini only has one FW 400 port. I'm using MPPT8 and it works. Love the small footprint!

[t_chance]

Originally Posted by tekis

That cuff thing looks cool. I'm running a Intel Dual Core 2g with FW 400. I use a Newertech Mini Stack V2.5 as a usb hub and recording drive ONLY. My LB wouldn't run off the FW on the hub. This took a long time to figure out. M-Audio told me to try using a usb drive for recording. My Mini only has one FW 400 port. I'm using MPPT8 and it works. Love the small footprint!

I'll qualify this by starting I'm not a mac guy.
The last space I was in the owner got a mini and it was never stable with my MPPT8 & M-powered 2626. Problems from the start when he had an external Firewire 800 drive and the M-powered was FW 400. The MINI had only one FW800 port and I had to adapt that to FW400 on the 2626. No easy way to work on the files he had pre-recorded on that drive in another studio. I never was able to read the EXT FW drive in line with the 2626. I never did get a USB drive and was only tracking (or trying to) to the MINI hard drive. I gave up on the PT tracking for now, but I may setup a Lightbridge/laptop as a backup and monitoring for my HD24.