Can as Raspberry Pi serve any practical purpose in the production process?

...and how to do so...
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Looking online I can only find projects that are built for the fun of building (nothing wrong with that) and not because the Pi can do something better/cheaper than a dedicated piece of hardware. Have any of you managed to enhance your process with a Pi?

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I have been wondering the same, I want a Pi, but wonder if it will be left on the shelf.

But looking at the specs of Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, this is almost like the power a regular laptop had 10 years ago:
-A 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU
-1GB RAM

It would be intersting to try to get LMMS to run on it

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That ARM core on the Pi is really low end. It's not going to be terribly practical as a signal generator for all but the most basic sounds (sample trigger, 8-bit style waveforms).

However, the chip is more than capable of being a midi generator or manipulator. It'd be excellent as the starting point for a custom arp, your own hardware interface to midi, cv to midi, or usb <-> midi converter.
Feel free to call me Brian.

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bmrzycki wrote:That ARM core on the Pi is really low end. It's not going to be terribly practical as a signal generator for all but the most basic sounds (sample trigger, 8-bit style waveforms)..
Erm, yes it is; its more powerful than systems that some people were using when this place started. Stuff like Rebirth ran on much slower PCs than that, and the quadcore Pi2 is capable of running the kind of stuff that's turned up on mobile phones.

Benchmarks put it somewhere around a 2003/2004 Pentium IV, which lots of people managed to use for far more than '8-bit style waveforms'.
http://www.tenpencepiece.net/blog/2015/ ... erry-pi-2/
That puts it around the speed of an early Intel Atom too, and Korg managed to build the original Kronos around that processor.

Even the original single-core Pi is capable of running realtime CSound and PureData patches. Google 'Qubit Nebulae'.
my other modular synth is a bugbrand

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AlexBridgez wrote:Looking online I can only find projects that are built for the fun of building (nothing wrong with that) and not because the Pi can do something better/cheaper than a dedicated piece of hardware. Have any of you managed to enhance your process with a Pi?
I'd quite like to have something like a Qubit Nebulae in my Eurorack modular synth. But they dont seem to be in production any more. If someone brings one out based on the Pi2, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

That said, I think any potential use of a Pi is fairly niche and far less immediate than most people here would be comfortable with.
my other modular synth is a bugbrand

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whyterabbyt wrote:That said, I think any potential use of a Pi is fairly niche and far less immediate than most people here would be comfortable with.
That's what I feared. Still, it will be an interesting space to watch in the future, especially with the Pi Zero being so small and affordable.

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pottering wrote:http://sonic-pi.net/
The thing with sonic pi is that, if you're interested in it, there's no reason to run it on a raspberry pi, just run it on your DAW machine. It's just a bog starndard application. The reason that pi has anything to do with it is because it was designed to be able to run on a machine when no better machine was available. The idea being that kids with few resources could still explore music and programming.

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I seem to remember seeing a DAC kit for the Pi in one of the "Beginner's Guide" magazines.

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seismic1 wrote:I seem to remember seeing a DAC kit for the Pi in one of the "Beginner's Guide" magazines.
Yeah, there are DACs out there, and Ive seen some 24/192KHz boards aimed at media player useage. In fact Ive just been lucky enough to order a Pi Zero and got a DAC board to go with it.
What I cant seem to find is a 16-bit (or better) audio rate ADC, though.
my other modular synth is a bugbrand

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samples and 8-bit sounds my arse! :lol:

https://soundcloud.com/pisynth/delia-bounce
my other modular synth is a bugbrand

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Wow, that's pretty impressive. Do you know if all voices were running at the same time, or where there overdubs?
I've been interested in getting into a platform, on which I can prototype stuff very quickly and throw it at my modular. STM32/ARM has seemed the way to go thus far but maybe I'll need to take another look at the Raspberry Pi.

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justin3am wrote:Wow, that's pretty impressive. Do you know if all voices were running at the same time, or where there overdubs?
I've been interested in getting into a platform, on which I can prototype stuff very quickly and throw it at my modular. STM32/ARM has seemed the way to go thus far but maybe I'll need to take another look at the Raspberry Pi.
From how it reads, its all at the same time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B44f_NB6Tg0

Check out 'Being Boiled' on this page too.

http://www.omenie.com/SynthCollection.html

I got a Pi Zero in the post today; tiny little beastie, and I also got a 24bit/192Khz shield in the same form factor for it for about a tenner (pHATdac). Im pretty damn sure its getting hooked up to my modular somehow. ;)
my other modular synth is a bugbrand

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I joined the Kickstarter for the Pine64. No clue what I'll do with it though.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pi ... per-comput
Incomplete list of my gear: 1/8" audio input jack.

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