Home Recording Centered on a Raspberry Pi, How feasible?

As I recently posted I came across a “deal” on the Behringer “U-PHORIA” (ugh, stupid name) UMC22 and UMC202HD USB audio interfaces, for $40 or $45. Even though I don’t anticipate getting a lot of use of out of these for… well, who knows. If there’s a move in the offing, which seems inevitable now, it might be a year or more… still, it got me thinking.

I was reading a lot of articles and watching a lot of Youtube videos on the functional differences between condenser microphones and dynamic microphones, and the problems of filtering out background noise, and one of the consistent gripes was about the microphones picking up computer fan noise, even notebook computer fan noise.

Since I’ve done a lot with Raspberry Pi computers and have several of them around, I jokingly thought “why not just record with a Raspberry Pi? No fan!”.

Then the more I thought about it, the less it seemed like a joke.

Seriously, why not?

Say you had a quiet room or corner somewhere in your home you could devote to recording. You don’t need another desktop computer or notebook for this, the processors in Raspberry Pi computers were designed with real-time transcoding in mind. Even the oldest, least powerful of them can stream HD video, no problem keeping up with audio. The $35 RPi 3 ($29 out-the-door at Micro Center B&M) has a quad-core processor, besides the built-in WiFi and Bluetooth, and still no fan needed with ventilation and passive heat sinks. Skip the hard drive and run Linux and Audacity off of a largish thumb drive, so no hard drive noises either. Set it up so that it automatically connects with the NAS in another room as a “network drive” and writes all the audio files there where they are instantly available from any machine in the house and automatically backed up, easy to do,so you can record in the “studio” spot and edit anywhere. A quiet USB or Bluetooth keyboard and mouse… there could be nothing inside the room generating background noise.

Either my Behringer UMC22 or the UMC202HD plugged into the RPi (probably through a powered hub doing double-duty in powering the RPi).

The most expensive parts are, of course, the transducers… or those that incorporate transducers.

The (computer) monitor for the RPi would be a big one, but the RPi puts out HD video over HDMI, so it’s not such a big deal. 1080p is not the finest resolution in the world for monitors but just fine for running the Audacity GUI, after all it’s not like photo or video editing, and I have a cheap 23″ Haier HDTV (1086p) in a room that barely gets used. These days I’ve seen far nicer setups available for just over $100.

Real studio monitors (speakers) are probably out of the question in this price range (unless you build your own, maybe), but we’re just talking about spoken voice here, not music, I have a some stereo mini-amps around and bookshelf speakers, and quite a few headphones.

Microphones may be a challenge. I just received a Samson MTR101A “kit” (including a nice shock mount and a pretty useless pop filter, but pop filters are cheap). Previously my only “real” mic was a Blue Snowball Ice USB, but of course that’s meant to plug directly into a computer, which might be useful in some circumstances but is also limiting in several ways, combining as it does an mic, pre-amp and ADC all in one, they don’t play well together in groups at all. I wasn’t going to go with a condenser mic for my first XML, I was going to go dynamic for podcast/home purposes, but hey, the whole kit was $50 shipped and got pretty good reviews, I figure it’s a way to learn more if nothing else.

We’re not talking anything like a pro studio here, because I’m not a “pro”, I’m just looking at amateur recording, not of singing or music, bu spoken-voice only… bottom line, all this could be done for far less cost than one of their typical microphones, never mind the rest of a real studio.

I enjoy this sort of thing, seeing just how good a really inexpensive rig can get, substituting knowledge for money. After all, that’s almost the whole point of the Raspberry Pi…. and other things I’m into… the Svord Peasant HD (knife). Rebuilding and modding old Thinkpads. For years I used the famous/infamous Lepai 2020A, slightly modded, to drive the bookshelf speakers on my desk, and in that period a variety of stuff ranging from $6 to$35 or so stood in for a USB DAC.

That runs entirely counter to the prevailing mind-set in “audiophile” circles of any kind, which seems to be the major attractor in the galaxy for snake-oil. We’ve all seen those posts, they all seem to use the same template in every technical field :
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“I’ve been a professional audio engineer for decades and I’ve created several recording studios and worked with huge names in the industry, everyone listens to me. Believe all of that because I say so, and here on the Internet nobody can refute me. I can tell you that any truly competent engineer (because only incompetents would disagree with me) knows that any microphone that costs less than about $30,000 is just absolute junk. Why, I just tried a $35,000 SUXBUX 9200 microphone on a whim, and I can tell you I’m about to dump it in Craigslist and just go back to my old trusty $65,0000 (on sale) 3RDMortgage Marie Antoinette Custom mic with the condenser made by Tibetan hermit monks while praying. Those crappy, cheap, $25,000 microphones you see on Fleabay and the Gray Market are made by workers that don’t even have Doctorates in Electrical Engineering doing their hand-soldering, they don’t take into account critical factors like the polarization that results from the wire-drawing process so they just randomly install wires backwards, there’s no compensation for barometric pressure, humidity or even the magnetic field of the Earth, so of course they sound like crap. Save yourself some grief and just wait until you can afford something at least half-decent even if you have to sell your car or house or something. You’ll be glad you did.”
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Sound familiar? It’s the Universal Gear-Snob Ego Post. It comes out pretty much the same whether the subject is private jets or hammers.

You could go that route, of course, always buy the best, most recognized gear, but what won’t happen then is important- you won’t learn much from it. If instead you refuse to do that, study up on the field, read everything you can get your hands on (and/or watch videos), look into modifying gear yourself, building it from kits or raw materials or salvaged parts or some combination of all three, and you’ll have a lot more fun and end up with a lot more real, practical knowledge than any passive consumer can gain, no matter how much they spend or how critical a consumer they think they are.

Of course I’m not the first to think of a Raspberry Pi-based podcast recording rig, some quick searches on the Internet turned up a few basic efforts, one much more technical and elaborate effort not yet complete, and even a couple that seem to have been abandoned. None of them seem to be quite what I have in mind, though all of them probably have elements I can use. No surprise there. That’s why you Do It Yourself.