[PD] Pd on a headless Raspberry Pi

[geoffroy]

Great thread, I join the list mainly to work on such a a project, it's quite exciting to think of having a portable programmable open source synth engine on the PI with a portable midi controller. I am working with the AKAI mini mpk, which has pad and keys and knob and nice feature like arpeggiator, sustain and program and prog change which is nice for such a small device.

With the PI the alsa is in alpha development on the arm platform and therefor won't be at it's best for a little while. The floating point integration in the latest system made the audio a lot better, as on the first gen OS of the PI the audio was just impossible.

I tried to play with chuck for a while, and it created a lot of audio garbage. I think it will be a hit and miss until the ALSA is stable enough sadly. I read also that using usb headphone made the sound even better, but I haven't tried that myself.

For the HDMI out what did you use? A dac from the HDMI ? I am looking for a simple solution to convert the HDMI to analog whether as a DIY simple solution or a really small and portable interface that could be boxed with the PI.


Geoffroy Tremblay
studio ponnuki


  Nope, I used a randomly generated sequence of notes made with phasors,
ranging from 0 to 127 on the midi scale.
Anyway, the quality of the analog output is not what concerns me here,
since it sounds ok with aplay. The problem is that the same type of sound
generated directly in Pd makes an awful lot of noise when i launch Pd at
start-up, though it sounds ok on the hdmi output.
Maybe it's something about the samplerate, no idea really.

It's a pity that no real serious documentation exists on how the audio
works (like the fact that the analog output is switched off when the hdmi
in plugged in : is it in the hardware ? can it be configured to not work
this way ?).

I'll try an ask on the RPi forum.

Nicorette is a brand that sells patches to stop smoking in France. I
thought it was funny

Cheers,

Pierre.