Headless Raspberry Pi Zero W Synthesizer with SunVox
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- čas přidán 23. 02. 2018
- Hello everyone! I took on the fun project of making a super simple headless Raspberry Pi Zero synthesizer. I wanted a solution that didn't require a keyboard, mouse, or monitor, and serves as a single-purpose analog-style synth device. I didn't include a whole lot of modules, but I hope this could be some good inspiration for anyone that wants to take it a step further and make it something truly great. It's a fairly portable solution that can be later hooked up to a monitor and re-programmed with other modules and instruments as you see fit.
If you found this guide useful, consider a friendly donation by visiting paypal.me/markyshaw
If you'd like to become a member of Marky's Funky Bunch, check me out on Patreon: / mshaw
I hope you enjoy!
Products I used:
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Raspberry Pi Zero W: amzn.to/2xifaY9
Raspberry Pi Zero WH: amzn.to/2xlokmL
Sabrent USB Audio Adapter: amzn.to/2xlp5fB
AKAI MPK Mini: amzn.to/2xnZKl0
Micro USB to USB Hub: www.adafruit.com/product/2991
SunVox: www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/
Mini HDMI Adapter: www.adafruit.com/product/2819
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I had the idea looong time ago, being a teenager, and you... you sir are my hero, this it's the ultimate materialization of that old dream :')
And now you can actually use raspbian on a banana pi m2 zero (costs as a pi zero hw) and have an touch screen to make it super duper fast and live useable/customizable!!!! :)))))
this is sooooo great
I got two Rpi0 with no wifi and didn't know what to do with them.
This + a 3D printed case will be a really good weekend project. Thanks for your video !
Great video, thank you so much for this! I got most of the gear at home and I’ve set up a retropie box in the past so I think this won’t be too hard to do. 👍🏼
This is great, I just someone smarter than me would just make an OS to put on the SD card to shove in there and you can start making music without having to fool with the interface. Like a VST player.
Badass, so well presented, thank you! Subscribed 🙏
Seeing this, I wonder how free space is in that midi controller. The zero might fit in there
GREAT tutorial, thank you!
Beautiful
Already have a Pi Zero sitting around not used, so Thanks!
Awesome!
Hello from Brazil! That's very cool, thanks for show me that my dreams can come true! I wonder how would it sound with a Mellotron plugin...
Your tutorial was excellent and worked flawlessly. Without any additional work, I also installed Milkytracker and it runs great as well. Any chance you could do a tutorial on Supercollider installed as an extension into emacs or vim so it could be started and used from the command line? My attempts from the command line haven’t worked. It works from the desktop in emacs but no luck on the command line. Just a thought.
Hello, really amazing tutorial, many thanks. I am trying to have a way to get the sunvox gui on a remote machine.
I use allot ssh X forwarding.
I tried with your build of SDL (i suppose it shouldn't work since you disabled x11)
Tried with APT install but nothing worked...
do you know a way? I fust what to be able to edit the sunvox GUI in the middle of a rehearsal for example.
Thanks in advance
Hello. Awesome usage Sunvox in PI. One question, could you try record input stream in sampler module? how cpu usaged if record and play drums or synth at the same time for example
Watched this around 10 times now , just waiting on my 3.5 inch screen and case for my pi 3 , I already have a nice big midi keyboard , do you have a pre made image for download ? I have built an arcade cab in the past and the pre made images were really helpful. Thanks
whoh ! thanks a lot !
Is a retranscription feasible?
Hey love the video and thank you so much for making it! Once you go hatless, what are you doing to get audio out? Does your keyboard have one built in?
Hey there AAAchilles1! I actually use that Sabrent USB Audio Adapter along with a 3.5mm cable plugged in the speaker output. It's not the best for line levels, but it sounds pretty decent all things considered. The keyboard itself is straight up MIDI. No audio outputs at all. Literally just a controller for the computer to trigger the synth sounds :-) Thanks for the comment my friend. I appreciate you watching!
@@MarkyShaw Thank you! I just wasn't paying enough attention haha
I'm just waiting for my pi zero to try this! Thank you for all of your content Marky Shaw. Update: I've got it working! Took longer than I should've because I didn't start with a fresh OS installation. I could never get my midi keyboard recognized in qjackctl. Now...it is amazing. I've got the buffer down to 128 frames and 2 periods in Jack and no glitching with analog generator or FM..with HDMI still active and on screen! Reported latency is 5.33 msec. I'm shocked. I don't understand our differences in latency Marky, can you advise? Thanks again, you are the man.
@Mahendra T. that was on my pi 4. My pi zero 2 is stable at 256 with 2 buffers. I'm messing around with reaper on it right now. it's amazing that you can use a daw with the new pi zero 2. I use a sabrent USB dongle or a umc22. I've gotten that latency low before but I feel like stability is best at 256.
Hi, nice vídeo!
Does the audio need a soundboard or can it be pulled from the HDMI?
Hi, I'm in Glen Burnie, MD. I've been following your RPi synth builds. I'm in the process of building a RPi synth as well using a model B, sunvox, latest Raspbian Stretch build, , sabre usb dac, & midi controller. My question is: You mentioned having to construct an RT Kernel in a previous build. Is that still necessary?
Hey Steve! Great to hear from a fellow Marylander! That is fantastic that you're building a Pi synth. Fortunately you DO NOT have to compile an RT kernel to get decent results with SunVox. The default installation of Stretch works great as long as JACK is configured properly. On the Pi 3, I've been getting great stability with 256 Frames / 48000 Hz. As soon as you boot up Stretch for the first time, run the "rpi-update" command to ensure you have the latest and greatest packages. Then you should be all set. Feel free to contact me if you run in to any troubles!
Thanks Mark. Will do!
Pi zero 2 coming to a Synth Near You.
TBC....
HI. Very new to Linux and the pi as well. Will any OS work with this project or does it have to be Raspbian Stretch?
Hi Leah! A lot of the same stuff does indeed apply on any version of Linux such as using JACK and SunVox, however a lot of the tutorial does indeed require Rasbian Stretch in particular. Long of the short of it, once you have your flavor of choice installed, download SunVox, install libSDL (required for SunVox), configure SunVox, configure JACK, and it's fairly straight forward. I'd be happy to assist you if you run in to snags. Let me know what version of Linux you're using, otherwise I'd highly recommend Raspbian since everything tends to work very smoothly :-)
Wow thanks so much for ur quick reply! I finally got everything figured out and have sunvox running now. But I’m having some issues connecting midi. When I run jack and open the midi settings, I only see in put ports but no output. Any idea why this might be?
Hello again Leah! Great to hear from you. 9 times out of 10 the reason why JACK isn't seeing your MIDI devices is because SunVox needs to be started first, prior to running Qjackctl. As long as your Audio Driver in SunVox is set to JACK and you restart SunVox, wait for everything to fully load and then go ahead and run Qjackctl. If the MIDI device isn't showing up still, then it's possible you'll need to set the driver drop-down menu to "raw" or "seq" in Qjackctl. Sometimes depending on the MIDI device, it could require one of those two options. You can basically just use Qjackctl once to set all of your jack options. Close out of Qjackctl completely. Start SunVox. Then run Qjackctl one more time to connect in the MIDI device. It's just a tad bit tricky as far as the order in which those things are done. Let me know if that works and I'd be happy to further assist :-) Hope all is well!
Crontab or system D would be a good option on Raspbian Lite.
Agreed there! I did a video last year on doing this same project in the Linux Console specifically for Raspbian Lite users! No Xorg required! It's a pain to setup, but the results are pretty cool. You're welcome to check it out sometime! czcams.com/video/9QP2FGNeSsk/video.html Thanks for watching my friend.
Will the sd crash because of the way you have to shut the pi off?
What about power failure scenario? How to recover from SD card corruption?
Hi, I'm currently trying to follow this guide and am getting stuck on using JACK. I'm on raspberry pi 3 b+ and each time I set up jack as you do in the video for the Sabrent, I do not get any audio through the Sabrent when I use SunVox, rather it comes through the TVs speakers. I've done everything in the video up to this point step by step and not really sure where I'm going wrong?
Never mind, I did a reboot which seemed to do the trick
Hey I know this is a slightly older video, but I was wondering how you would set up multiple presets/patches, and switch between them. I have an M-audio midi keyboard as well as a korg nano kontrol 2 that I plan to use to adjust the different parameters. Any help setting this all up would be great! Thanks!
If you can change the midi channel on your controller, just set up your synths in sunvox to answer to different channels. Otherwise, you will probably want to set sunvox to listen for a certain midi signal to switch out metamodules. If you check out the sunvox forums, they'll get you going in the right direction.
bit late to the game, but you can have ~1048560 presets controllable thru midi-channel/cc combinations.
Besides 16 midi-channels you can assign a midi-CC to the 'input'-parameter of a metamodule.
The input-parameter basically decides which (nested machine) receives midi input.
The latest raspbian comes with pipewire. Not sure how anyone configures that
Is possible to edit jack files instead of setup via graphics interface?
J PL I’m currently working on that same exact issue actually. I’ve nearly finished getting SunVox working in just the console. You can indeed edit your ~\.jackrc file and basically setup the command line attributes for starting the daemon, however I’ve yet to find out how the MIDI connections work. There are some command line utilities that supposedly work, but I haven’t gotten them to work yet! Short answer, yes, but I’m not quite sure how yet. I’ll keep working and will let you know if I figure it out!
Hi J PL! Just following up, albeit a few months later. I did finally manage to get JACK working without Qjackctl or any graphics interface. Feel free to check out my latest video on getting SunVox working in the Linux Console and there I talk about using the jack_connect and a2jmidid programs to get everything working without a GUI. It's a wonderful thing! Thanks my friend.
Just a short question, how do you shutdown this thing without corrupting your filesystem everytime you just pull the plug?
Hey there Dietmar, well the short answer is, the file system doesn't get corrupted "everytime" you pull the plug. Of course it's not recommended to just unplug it, however from my own experience, I still own and operate every Pi since the very first Pi 1 (all of which are running constantly), and I have yet to corrupt a single filesystem by unplugging and plugging it back in. Which has literally been hundreds if not thousands of times. BUT, I've often thought about the power switch idea and came up with a solution in my first Pi Synth video that involves using a power switch from an old computer case, and hooking it up to pins 5 and 6 (GPIO 3 and 4) on the GPIO header. Of course with the Pi Zero W, you'd need to get the GPIO pins themselves soldered on the motherboard, or get the Pi Zero WH. Then I used the instructions from howchoo.com/g/mwnlytk3zmm/how-to-add-a-power-button-to-your-raspberry-pi to create the Python script. Pretty cool stuff and it works very well. It's still not a *true* power switch, but it works great for these types of projects. Otherwise, I'm not gonna get too bent out of shape if I break a $5 SD card. Which surprisingly hasn't happened yet. *knocks on wood* Thanks for your comment!!
Thanks for your answer, maybe I'll try the python script and GPIO button idea then. Just to be on the safe side... It's the same thing with USB flash drives,, you *should* first dismount it before pulling it out but most of the time you don't, you won't immediately destroy it... ;)
I wonder if the mpk mini has room to install the zero inside.
Fictions I would think so, I’m putting a full sized pi with a screen running sun vox into my axiom 49 , I’m taking out the section where the drum pads are
i only have the rpi2... can i do it with that?? I'm completely new to RPI and LINUX, BUT i really REALLY want to learn more :D
Hi Boi! Absolutely! The RPi2 should work almost exactly the same using the instructions I provided. Just be sure that you're running the latest version of the Raspbian operating system and you should be in a good shape! Give it a try and let me know how it works out for you :-) Feel free to check out some of my other vids if you plan on hooking up a monitor to your Pi. You might not need a headless system, but either way you have the option. Thanks for watching!
Yeah thanks! definitely want to go headless :D what kind of other stuff do you do??
I've got a Pi Zero with the same USB HUB but it will not work with the Pi. Where did you buy your power supply? Because that's the only thing that might be the problem. My PSU says it's 2 Ampere, but I doubt that...
can you run pianoteq7 on it?
Would this process be the same for the Pi Zero (Not W)?
Luke Schaefer absolutely! The hardware is practically the same. I’d recommend plugging in a USB WiFi or Ethernet card for your initial setup so you can download the necessary software. Give it a shot!
Thanks for your speedy reply! Just ordered everything I need.
i wonder how much you can squeeze out of sunvox with the pi zero in terms of cpu :) i'm not really sure if my stuff requires lot of cpu , but i tend to use a "few" modfules
I bet you can squeeze quite a bit out of it! I know my tutorial only uses just a couple modules, but I've definitely had no problems using SpectraVoice and a variety of different effects while staying in the 75-90% CPU utilization. That's pushing it for sure, but I think it's fairly tolerable as long as you're not multitasking or doing crazy stuff in addition to the synth :-) It makes the perfect single-purpose solution. Although I can almost guarantee that it would work 10 times better if someone could get SunVox working in the console properly! I'm hoping to tackle that subject next, using Raspbian Stretch Lite, and not even touch Xorg. We'll see how it goes!
I am very grateful for your response :) it is somewhat important to me , as i was considering dedicated HW synth .. but those things are sooooo expensive .. no matter how limited you're willing to go. Sunvox is great and powerful and the idea i could be taking it with me around ( possibly battery powered ) is a dream come true :) if you're into synthesis but low on budget. One more time, your feedback is much appreciated.
I just don't understand why my RPi 2 just can't handle sunvox :S
Oh??? What seems to be the problem? The RPi 2 is faster than this Pi Zero so perhaps we can figure out what's causing the problems! Do you have all the latest and greatest versions of Raspbian and SunVox? That's always the first place I start, then we start troubleshooting application slowness, and potential MIDI latency issues. If you need anything, I'm happy to help my friend.
@@MarkyShaw That would be awesome! Do u think it might be possible to make the RPi2 working so it can be a usb host (for converting usb midi controller to regular midi with usb>midi cable) AND sunvox OR SamplerBox at the same time??
Haha sorry for the bombardment of questions :p
Really Needs debian package to avoid all that installation geekery.