Mellotraspbian

Discussion of all things Raspberry Pi / Raspberry Pi 2 related

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Frank Carvalho
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Posts: 363
Joined: Sat Nov 17, 2012 3:36 pm

Mellotraspbian

Post by Frank Carvalho »

I have been considering getting rid of my AKAI S3000 sampler from my rehearsal rack for a while, and during the christmas holidays I just had to see if I could manage this with just a RPi2. My AKAI serves only as my fake mellotron, with samples of mellotrons #106 (my own) and #1380. This means essentially full 8 second samples over 35 notes for each sound. On my main DAW I made an SF2 sound font in Swami with 3Violins, 8Choir, Brass, Flute and Oboe, and a mighty "Watcher of the Skies" combination of Brass and 3Violins, so my target was to be able to play back this sound font. I also need to filter MIDI so it only plays on MIDI channel 2.
The autostatic repo has a sufficiently recent version of carla with fluidsynth, so I could make a working routing and plugin setup with MIDI channel filtering. I modified the performance improvement script mentioned in the other RPi2 thread to kill OpenBox/LDXE - as it must run headless - and then start jack with my USB M-Audio Quattro, a2jmidid, and carla and have it autoconfigure the loading of the soundfont and the routing. And it works! This little box actually plays back all my samples nice and clean with a buffer size of 512 and period of 3, which gives an acceptable latency for mellotron playing. So this is a mellotron to carry in your pocket. I will take it for a field test tomorrow and see if the setup is stable enough for real life use.

/Frank
Vox, Selmer, Yamaha and Leslie amplifiers. Rickenbacker, Epiphone, Ibanez, Washburn, Segovia, Yamaha and Fender guitars. Hammond, Moog, Roland, Korg, Yamaha, Crumar, Ensoniq and Mellotron keyboards. Xubuntu+KXStudio recording setup.
pepper.mitten
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Joined: Fri Jan 01, 2016 8:06 pm

Re: Mellotraspbian

Post by pepper.mitten »

maybe this is old hat to all of you, but i love that you are doing this. so many possibilities come to mind. im new to this board and am really inspired by so many of the projects you all are trying. best of luck with your trials :)
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