Solar powered, portable, multitrack recording

Over the last couple of years I have been putting together a portable recording system that I can use in places without electricity as part of a project funded by Macquarie Uni to develop appropriate archiving tools for use in Melanesia. It was first used in a pretty remote village called Taramata on the island of Small Malaita (the southern bit of Malaita) in the Solomon Islands. I travelled there with Adriel Tahisi, a graduate of the music section at UPNG where I used to teach, and we recorded various panpipe, bamboo and vocal ensembles. We took some great video there but I lost the camera on a marathon trip back to Honiara so the following video shows the gear in use in a small village near Honiara called Ohiuola.



I use a Metric Halo 2882 (http://www.mhlabs.com) because it is an amazing piece of gear - great preamps, converters, and a really flexible matrix system for routing. The problem is it only works with Macs, and I like to use Linux and figure open source makes a lot of sense in places that can't afford expensive audio software (especially when apps like Ardour equal proprietary programs in quality)... I actually bought the box because Metric Halo had apparently been very positive about the idea of letting developers of ffado (http://www.ffado.org - firewire audio drivers for linux) get access to a box to write Linux drivers but that has turned out to be nothing but hype unfortunately. My ideal system would be a Linux box running Jack and Ardour with a firewire audio device that runs off the laptop for power (like the 2882).

It's great to be somewhere with no power, but decent sun, and set up 8 mics (with phantom power if necessary) with studio quality pre-amps. Redefines both field recording and the idea of studio as far as I am concerned.