Pinebook Pro?

[jiyong]

Greetings! I'm planning on purchasing a PBP.  I would like to use it as a daily work machine for email and web browsing, but I'm curious if it may be usable for my side gig.  I am a recording engineer.  I would need it to run jack+ardour to record up to 16 track simultaneously @ 44.1k. Does anyone see any reason this won't work? The storage world be a concern. I would probably place sessions and tracks on USB drives.

Audio recording in and of itself isn't a cpu-heavy task, so while the PBP doesn't have a ton of horsepower it will probably handle that alright.  Make sure your storage device can handle the throughput though.

Doing editing, however, is not something I would recommend.

Editing, or even any plugins at all is not part of the plan.  I just want to write to disk.  Everything else would be done at home on a different machine. 

Are there throughput limitations for the PBP usb?  Focusrite gear all runs on USB 2.0, so I would probably consider using the USB 3 port on the pbp for the storage. I have recorded stuff like this to an sd card before, so I'm hoping there's not going to be much of a problem.

I would not expect any issues then.  AFAIK the only throughput "limitations" on the PBP is the fact that the camera/mic are USB (and I assume the keyboard/trackpad are too), but those are inconsequential.  If I did my math right, 16 channels of 48k 24bit audio is only 18Mbps, and standard USB2 spec supports a theoretical max of 480 Mbps, so you're well within range.  I didn't know if an SD card would support that, but certainly any hard drive should, let alone eMMC or SSD

A class 10 (10 MB/s) SD card should be able to handle that. One word of caution, once an SD card gets too fragmented, performance can drop significantly.
https://www.sdcard.org/developers/overview/speed_class/