Hey sorry its been hella long but to get back to you on getting sunvox as an application instead of terminal. If you go into main menu>Preferences>main menu editor, this will give you full creativity to make whatever apps you like. All you need is either a terminal command pasted in there or a path to the app you want to launch eg: /home/pi/where-ever/application.file and the rest is just basic customisation. And btw just saying dont worry about messing up here and there, ive found that once youve realised a mistake you keep making and learn from it, you actually never forget it ever again and best of all these OS are a lot easier to start from scratch compared to windows or mac. And @Kirou is right about os, @rex has loads and ive tried some and they are nice and im planning on giving some arch based (manjaro, parrot) ones a go as a way to learn arch linux.
i thought i posted here but apparently didn’t. for the folks who are interested in orca, i have a fork of it with additional operators like scale, arpeggiator, midichord, bouncer (a very rudimentary lfo) etc. regular midicc op is also modified to accept hex digit values (so you can choose CC0 to CC127, therefore not bound by base36 of orca) and to battle “aliasing” (especially when using midicc and bouncer together) i even implemented a very primitive interpolation. it’s not the best optimized code (got lots of help from chatgpt since i’m not very experienced with C), but hey, it works!
oh, and i highly recommend using it on tty. it’s much more responsive compared to terminal. perhaps even within tmux to “color” it with themes
(currently i’m sequencing my sonicware liven ambient0 with it to compose generative pieces)
Before I order, is it confirmed Sonic PI will run on this uConsole?
Any updates or anything needed if not as east as install you mentioned?
Yes, it runs on my uConsole with the RPI-CM4 module. Just install by using apt or get a newer version from the sonic-pi github page, version 4.4 is the latest for bullseye, on bookworm you can run most recent version.
The only quirc is that you need to run sonic-pi full screen otherwise some ui elements are not fitting.
Sweet thank you for confirming!
LMMS and one or two other DAWs seem to work OK, and I am hoping the programmer who made Caustic 3 will start selling/giving it free for Linux. It is free on the PC, a few dollars/pounds for the Android and iPad versions, has various generic synths eg FM, modular, PCM, drums, organ, etc, and exports MIDI. I recommend adding a USB hub to expand the USB of the uConsole, if you can get one that takes SD cards you can store audio, samples, clips, etc on it, indepe3ndent of the OS SD card. Or use a USB key. I will be interfacing each of my synths (Novation MiniNova, Korg Monologue, Arturia MicroBrute, a couple of Behringers, etc, and i will see if the MIDI software available for the RPi will work in place of the manufacturer stuff. My experience with hooking them to a PC running Linux and my old raspberryPi is that most things can be done, just without so many fancy graphics, and the important stuff is possible, sometimes with a workaround. NB you can get things like CSound and other music programming languages on the uConsole, algorithmic computing, crerating your own software synths and filters etc.
I have tried out several of my USB audio inte4rfaces and USB MIDI interfaces with the uConsole, and so far they have all worked as intended. The PreSonux Audiobox 96 has audio and MIDI in one box around the footprint of the uConsole, although its vertical depth is around 6cm, but I found I could stand the uConsole on top of it, and no heat issues. the combination is small enough to fit into some of the cases intended for cameras that have been recommended for the uConsole, so this is one combination any music-makers might want to consider. I have tried my Zoom R24 with the uConsole. The Zoom is a digital audio recorder, top end model, with audio interface, DAW control/mixer, drum sequencer, and pad triggers. The USB capabiolities work for audio, but you need - as with other such DAW controllers - to use software to map the buttons and sliders. there are a number of free and paid-for programs out there. If you want to send MIDI data via an interface from Linux there are several commandline apps that you can use, or echo a text file to the MIDI interface. Instructions come with the softweare, or in various user groups. It’s how I get around Windows, iOS, and OSX not supporting some MIDI stuff. I haven’t tried accessing the SD in the Zoom from the uConsole, but if it is possible, it would allow users to read and write the recorded clips from the DAW that have been recorded. Note that you do have to watch out for overloading the data amount - the uConsole starts to complain if the virtual or physical synths are sending toio much data at the same time eg if you have a lot of softsynths running. the trick is to send the audio from any softsynth you are not working on to another DAW channel, play that back without the softsynth sending *(frozen), while you do things with the other softsynths. It is worth saving out sioftsynth channels as MIDI files you can reload, with all the notes and automation, so if the DAW starts running out of tracks or CPU, you can slim things down. I am currently working on the audio for an SF/Horror audiobook script i am working on, so clips of effects and music are involved, some from MIDI, some from audio. The uConsole SD card may get filled up quite fast iof you are using a lot of clips… so check space from time to time, or offload files onto a USB drive or SD card in a USB reader device…
Is there anyone rocking a CM5 who can comment on recording latency from MIDI keyboard input? What about battery drain when connecting to audio interfaces w/ powered mics?
i’ve been using Cardinal on a CM5 4gb uConsole and it’s handling it surprisingly well. with a CM4 even a very basic patch made it struggle, CM5 can handle a huge generative ambient patch with plenty of modulation and multiple instances of plateu.