Minimum Specs

Forgive me for asking a stupid question that is most likely answered elsewhere (I did look, honest).

What are the minimum hardware / software requirements to run mAirlist?

IMHO it’s not a stupid question because I’ve been searching this information on the homepage too. Without any result. Wiki and FAQ couldn’t help either.
I wanted to recommend Mairlist to a friend but could not answer him his questions on the hardware requirements.

It’s not easy to give a definite answer, because in the age of multitasking, and with all the different processor types available, a pure GHz figure doesn’t mean anything.

Any recent PC should be fine - Cad is even running it on a 1 GHz machine or so. If it’s a very slow CPU, you might have to turn off certain graphic features, e.g. the new waveform display in the players in v4.

The required hard drive space is merely 10 MB, and mAirList uses about 30-40 MB RAM when idle, depending on your configuration. You will need more RAM if you turn on RAM buffering of network files etc.

Thanks, Torben.
Since Pentium 4 PC’s actually are quite cheap on the used hardware market (1 Ghz and above), this should cause no problems?
However, regarding Windows and Mairlist running, is 512 MB RAM too small?

Hm… aren’t even cheap used computers faster than 2 GhZ today? 1 GhZ sounds very ancient to me.

Regarding RAM, read what I said about mAirList’s RAM usage above. The total amount of RAM doesn’t say anything about the free amount, and that, in turn, depends heavily on the Windows version, the number of background processes and services, and so on.

Hmph! >:( Seriously though, at the time (maybe four years ago?) it was a good deal: cost me £30 (it had been repossessed by a company a friend works for).

True. But I found that XP in general (and therefore mAirList) worked a lot faster when I added some GBs of RAM to my “ancient” :stuck_out_tongue: 1GHz PC.

But to return to the point, I agree with the OP that we should really try to construct a minimum and recommended PC spec. for mAirList. I’ll have a think about this and will post a draft version in this thread in a little while. Obviously (?) this will be for mAirList 3.1 for now; until our studio re-fit is over (whenever that is! :(), I simply don’t have time to investigate mAirList 4.0: sorry!

BFN
Cad

Precisely; this is my idea. Since I bought a very cheap P4 1,5 Ghz PC on ebay my idea is to spend him some RAM and a new HDD with Win XP as my one and only Mairlist PC.
A reliable radio machine, not more not less.

I don’t any reason why that shouldn’t work.

Ideally, get some RAM (2GB total should be fine), a decent sound card (obviously!), and though it may sound odd, a half-decent graphics card.

It doesn’t need to be even close to current ‘gaming’ specs., but any card faster than your standard onboard VGA card is fine, ideally with hardware acceleration. About €60 (maybe less!) should easily buy you a suitable card. The more progress bars, countdowns, etc. that you use in your mAirList layout, the more you’ll find such a card will help performance. :wink: My own “ancient” PC (1GHz processor, 1GB RAM, onboard VIA Tech graphics) works just fine; and even if I add LED clocks, extra progress bars, etc., it will still cope; but the screen display very occasionally has minor problems keeping up with all the screen updates. Hence my recommendation.

BFN
Cad

OK, I’ve given this issue a little thought, and this is what I’ve come up with as ‘minimum’ and ‘recommended’ PC specifications.

Minimum specification:
1 GHz processor
1 GB RAM
VGA graphics card (or motherboard controller)
16-bit sound card* (or motherboard controller) with WDM or ASIO drivers
50 MB** of free disk space
Two-button mouse
Windows XP with Service Pack 3

Recommended specification:
4 GHz processor
4 GB RAM
16 MB graphics card (or motherboard controller) with hardware acceleration
16-bit sound card* (or motherboard controller) with balanced outputs and WDM or ASIO drivers
100 MB** of free disk space
Two-button mouse with scroll wheel
Windows 7

  • the number of stereo output channels depends on your station’s requirements
    ** audio storage is in addition to this, and depends on the size of your station’s audio library

I freely admit that the ‘recommended’ RAM, graphics, and disk space specs. are just things I made up off the top of my head. An installed copy of mAirList 3.1 occupies about 15MB of disk space; and I’m no expert on graphics cards. ;D

What do you think of these specs. as a starting point for discussion, Torben?

BFN
Cad

Sounds good.

Although I must say that the “free disk space” think feels so very 1990ish. I wouldn’t want to know what my Windows feels like with only 100 MB disk space left.

Well, I’ve genuinely seen user machines where no-one has ever emptied the IE cache and temp. files, and thus got ‘Windows is running low on virtual memory’ (=disk space) error.

If you think it’s better to just not mention disk space at all, that’s fine: but anyone using a Very Old PC to run mAirList may well have ‘small’ HDs of 1GB or so to go with their ‘old’ processors and such.

(You need to have been there at the time, and been truly amazed by the ‘massive’ 20MB HDs which originally appeared, when the alternative was at most a 360KB floppy, to understand my quotes around ‘small’ when describing a 1GB disk. The IBM mainframes I used to work on at about the same time had HDs which only held ~300MB!).

BFN
Cad