![]() As it turns out, I didn't end up needing a mouse, so in the end I did do a little testing on the A+. ![]() I'll mention significant differences in performance when applicable. Regardless of which Pi model you use, you'll want to keep the overhead for the rest of the system as low as possible. If you're familiar with Fluxbox or Ratpoison, those may be the non-desktops to go with when making music. Sequencer: a program that keeps track of what sound will play and when.So what do we need to make music on the Pi? Electronic music traditionally consists of two components: If you're not familiar with that style of interface, then go with LXDE (which is usually the default desktop on Pi distributions). Linux offers a lot of both, so the first order of business is to look at the options out there, and try them out on the Pi. Lightweight ALSA appsĪt first, I looked at a few of the usual suspects for low-spec sound work I loaded up a few modular components and tested them out. I found straight away that JACK on a Pi was not practical. Because many Linux sound applications expect JACK, my options were more limited than what I am used to on my Slackware workstation. I eventually settled on the modular Seq24 MIDI sequencer to provide a "piano roll" editing interface for composition, along with AMsynth as the synth to provide sounds. I sent signals from Seq24 to ALSA's inbuilt MIDI-In to trigger AMSynth. No JACK required, and a fairly lightweight solution.Īfter an afternoon of trying out my simple Pi audio workstation, I found that it only worked as a proof-of-concept. Once I got serious about making music on it, rather than just making loops for fun, I found that it ran very slow even with just a simple sequence, and a lot worse when I added more synths into the mix. It was fun to noodle around with, but it definitely wasn't something I'd take on the road (and by "road", I mean "studio") to perform or to an event to teach people about computer music. Music wasn't always made on fast multi-core computers with gigabytes of RAM. In fact, music used to be (and still is, in some circles) made on rack units that used floppy disk drives and MIDI cables. In other words, instead of trying to use lightweight versions of modern music software, the ultimate answer turns out to be a grand old tradition of electronic music: the tracker.Ī proper history of trackers is out of scope for this article, so if you're interested, look up information on the original trackers like FastTracker and ProTracker. (Arguably earlier, depending on how you view some of the earlier hardware interfaces on some drum machines and sample sequencers.) For now, suffice it to say that the concept of trackers has been around since at least the early '90s. The one I chose to use, of the three that are familiar to me (Milky, Schism, and Sound), is MilkyTracker. MilkyTracker was GPLed in 2008, and it seeks to emulate one of popular original trackers, FastTracker. It is cross-platform and extremely lightweight because it doesn't rely on synthesizers to produce sound instead, it triggers samples.
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