Exit BeagleBone Black, hello Cubieboard2!

September 17, 2013 jeremya20, allwinner, armhf, audio, bbb, beaglebone, beagleboneblack, black, cubieboard, cubieboard2, debian, edirol, kernel, linux, patchset, pi, raspberry, raspberrypi, realtime, rpi, rt, ua25, usb, wheezy20 Comments

Put up my BeagleBone Black for sale. It was gathering dust, somehow this board doesn’t appeal to me. Biggest drawback is that it seems to be very picky with power adapters. If you don’t use a linear power adapter USB devices might not work properly. And that was exactly the issue I was facing, I just couldn’t get my USB audio interfaces to work on the BBB. So I lost interest because well, that’s what I bought the device for, to get sound out of it with the help of an USB audio interface. Add to this that there is no realtime kernel or RT patchset available for the BBB and that the BBB is quite a complex little device (it’s actually a REAL dev board). It would’ve cost me too much time to completely fathom it. No bad feelings though, the BBB is a very nice product and it sure has the slickest looks of all ARM SoC dev boards around.

Also I got a Cubieboard2 in recently. And that board has absorbed me for the last week and a half. It’s quite easy to set up (not as easy as the RPi though), has a lot of IO (yes, it has audio in and out!) and it blows both the RPi and BBB away when it comes to performance with its dual core A20 Allwinner SoC that can easily be overclocked to 1.2 GHz. Alas, no realtime kernel or RT patchset either but hey, I managed to get a RT kernel running on a Rockchip RK3066 based device so I could at least give it a try. And it worked out well. I’m now running a 3.4.61-rt77 kernel on it with a custom Debian Wheezy installation. This time I used git to keep track of the modifications I made so it was a lot easier to create a usable diff. I also patched the driver for the onboard audio codec because the hardcoded defaults were just unusable for realtime audio. Minimum number of periods was 4 and minimum buffer size was 1024. Don’t ask me why. So I’ve changed these to 2 and 16 respectively and managed to get JACK running at a respectable -p64 -n2 -r44100. Fired up some JACK clients and this little monster keeps up very well. USB audio interfaces are no problem either, I can run my Edirol UA25 in Advanced mode with -p64 -n3 -r48000 without any hitch. This is probably because the Cubieboard2 doesn’t use a Synopsys DesignWare OTG controller with out-of-tree dwc_otg drivers like the RPi but a better supported USB controller. At the moment the Cubieboard2 is the nicest ARM dev board I have laid my hands on so far.

Cubieboard2

RT patchset 3.4.61-rt77 for linux-sunxi, sunxi-3.4 branch

Low latency defaults patch for sunxi-codec driver

First Dutch Raspberry Jam

September 10, 2013 jeremyamplifier, audio, demo, guitar, jam, latency, linux, low, low_latency, nieuwegein, ordina, pi, presentation, raspberry, real_time, realtime, rpi, sampler, sequencer, synthesizer, tunestorm, tweak, virtualLeave a comment

The first Dutch Raspberry Jam will take place on Thursday September 26 at the Ordina HQ in Nieuwegein. I’ve offered to do a presentation about doing real-time audio with the Raspberry Pi which has been accepted. Internet visibility of this event is minimal at the moment though, let’s hope it caches on.

So expect a presentation/demo about using your Raspberry Pi as a sequencer, synthesizer, sampler or virtual guitar amp. I will show how to configure, tweak and tune your RPi for real-time, low-latency audio and what the possibilities of such a set-up are. I’ll probably do a live demo too of some tracks generated by one or more RPi’s

Ordina Raspberry Jam

Raspberry Pi Playlist @ AutoStatic’s YouTube channel

Employed!

September 7, 2013 jeremyalkmaar, cyso, hosting, job, linux, providerLeave a comment

Got a new job! The 16th of September I’m starting at Cyso, a top-notch hosting provider. Located in Alkmaar, very close to the place I’ve worked for the last two years. It all went very fast, less than 3 weeks. Didn’t expect to find a new job that suits me so quickly. This will be a huge step forward for me and I’m very happy and grateful the people at Cyso offered me this opportunity.

Workshops Music Production with Open Source Software: Introduction and Basic Principles

September 4, 2013 jeremyalsa, audio, bakkerij, dssi, ecosystem, framework, jack, ladspa, linux, lv2, modular, monolithic, music, open, plug_in, plugin, plugins, production, pulseaudio, software, source, vst, wokshops, workshop2 Comments

This Saturday my series of workshops about music production with open source software will kick off. The first workshop will be an introduction to the open source ecosystem and attendees will get acquainted with some basic Linux audio principles; different work-flows (monolithic vs modular), ALSA/JACK/PulseAudio, most used and most useful applications and maybe a bit about plug-in frameworks (LADSPA/DSSI/LV2/VST). I will also outline the content of the following workshops and this workshop is a gauge to see if there is enough interest. So people should show up in considerate numbers because I’m not going to invest another 5 Saturday afternoons for just a few people. After all, I’m doing this for free (as in beer).

Announcement on the site of De Bakkerij

Facebook event

The wait is almost over

August 28, 2013 jeremyaudio, automation, falktx, fundamental, linux, lv2, parameters, plug_in, plugin, yoshimi, youtube, zyn, zynaddsubfx1 Comment

For years users have been asking for a ZynAddSubFX or Yoshimi plug-in with a GUI for Linux. It seems the wait is almost over thanks to the great work of Filipe Coelho aka falkTX.

ZynAddSubFX-LV2 Test #1 (Qtractor)

According to falkTX work on the plug-in is almost 90% done. Parameters can be restored too as the following video shows.

ZynAddSubFX-LV2 Test #2 (Ardour)

Apparently the developer of ZynAddSubFX is working on exposing all parameters so in the future it should also be possible to automate Zyn’s most relevant parameters. Needless to say this stuff is still highly experimental so use at your own risk. I’ve done quite some tests and the plug-in keeps up well, also if you use many of them within a project (I’ve tested with a project with about 15 ZynAddSubFX-LV2 instances). But this doesn’t mean the plug-in doesn’t have any flaws, closing its GUI could crash your DAW for instance. Further tests should reveal all the obvious bugs so everyone, get that code and test it! Build instructions can be found in the aforementioned forum thread.

Many, many thanks to falkTX for making this possible!

Unemployed

August 28, 2013 jeremyarm, audio, bakkerij, instrument, linux, unemployed, workshop2 Comments

As of 2013-09-30 I will be unemployed. Can’t tell any details here but I’m already very busy looking for new job opportunities, applying for jobs and doing job interviews. If all goes well I can start right away at a new employer. I even had to take my CV offline because I risked getting too many offers.

I’ve also accepted an offer to do some Linux audio consultancy work. Just received my contract and I’m stoked about it. And no, can’t share any details on that either. When it comes to details this is a lousy blogpost, leaving you a bit in the dark, sorry about that. But as soon as I can tell more I’ll do so. For the moment I think it’s ok to say that I’ll be doing consultancy work for a project to create an instrument based on an ARM device. It’s a bit of a dream come true, doing paid Linux audio R&D. So back to work, I also have to set up a website for my consultancy activities. And get everything ready for the first workshop at De Bakkerij.

Carla on the Raspberry Pi

July 26, 2013November 8, 2015 jeremyarm, aubio, audio, carla, chroot, dssi, falktx, gig, host, kxstudio, ladspa, linux, linuxsampler, linuxvst, lv2, pi, piem, plug_in, plugin, rasbian, raspberry, raspberrypi, repository, rpi, sf2, sfz, vst, zynaddsubfx19 Comments

Last week I managed to get Carla running on my RPi. Carla is a really nice plugin host that supports the most important plugin frameworks available for Linux (LV2, DSSI, LADSPA and VST) with some awesome extra features like a built-in ZynAddSubFX synth and support for SF2, SFZ and GIG files. The latter didn’t work until yesterday but I managed to compile LinuxSampler (which is needed by Carla in order to be able to load SFZ and GIG files) for the RPi with the help of Paul Brossier aka piem from the Aubio project.

I just wrote him a mail:

Hello Paul,

I’m trying to package LinuxSampler for Raspberry Pi but I’m running into an issue when compiling which fails with a message related to RTMath.h. After some googling I ended up here:
http://bb.linuxsampler.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=514#p3156
So I started scouring the interwebs and found this:
http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/linuxsampler/news/20050806T210205Z.html
Where there is a reference to a possible fix. But the diff.gz that contains the patch is untraceable. I know this announcement is almost 8 years old but do you think you still have the diff or maybe an idea what changes you made to the code?

Thanks in advance and keep up the good work with Aubio!

Best regards,

Jeremy Jongepier

And guess what, he replied almost instantly! He gave me some pointers where to add some extra code and even though I’m not a coder I started trying things out. But then I stumbled upon actual patches to resolve this issue. I needed both the ARM and atomic patch and after applying those LinuxSampler compiled flawlessly in my Raspbian ARM chroot. The few lines of code I cooked up myself were almost identical so I got quite far actually. I should really pick up learning how to code, I think I’d learn fast.

So after compiling LinuxSampler I could rebuild Carla against the freshly created LinuxSampler libs. Installed the deb on my RPi and loaded some SFZ’s. It all worked like a charm. Carla is like a Swiss Army Knife, I’m really starting to appreciate this piece of software. Kudos to falkTX! And thanks to Paul Brossier for responding so quickly and helping me to get on the right track.

Carla running on the Raspberry Pi

Open AV Productions: Fabla

July 11, 2013 jeremyaudio, drumkv1, fabla, haaren, harry, linux, lv2, openavproductions, plugin, sampler, samplv1, sorcer2 Comments

Who recalls the times when Linux audio users were craving for a sampler LV2 plugin? Soon we will have even more choice besides drumkv1 and samplv1, enter Fabla! No idea what Fabla stands for but it sure looks fablalous.

Fabla by Open AV Productions uses the same release model as used with Sorcer recently. Instead of a year it took 9 days to push back the release date of Sorcer and hopefully the same thing will happen with Fabla. I’d love to get my hands on this plugin so I’ve done my part to speed up the release date.

Edit: Fabla has been released within 8 days!

More ARM goodies II

July 9, 2013 jeremyarm, audio, bbb, beaglebone, black, debian, kernel, latency, linux, low, lowlatency, mk808, pi, raspberry, raspberrypi, real, realtime, rk3066, rockchip, rpi, time, ug80x, wheezy2 Comments

Received the BeagleBone Black (BBB) and the MK808 with a RK3066 SoC. My first impressions are really positive. Especially the BBB is quite an awesome device that I’m probably going to use a lot in favor of the Raspberry Pi. At first glance I had something like, the BBB blows the RPi away, but as soon as I started looking for documentation on how to put Debian on it for instance it became clear that the RPi is still the device to beat. The RPi community is huge, documentation for it is well laid out and working with the RPi is just so easy. The BBB on the other hand lacks a vivid community, is $10 more expensive and a lot more difficult to work with. Take the Debian install for example, seems quite some work to get that going.

The MK808 is surely an improvement over the UG80X I already own. It comes with a HDMI port instead of a HDMI plug, has an extra USB OTG port, a heatsink, hardware serial console access, a reset button and a power indicator LED. The pre-installed Android version looks better too. I flashed my RT kernel recovery image on it, inserted the Micro SD from my UG80X and it booted without any issues. So I’m going to pursue my goal to get a real-time, low-latency environment running on a RK3066 based device on the MK808 and find another purpose for the UG80X.

Edit: Getting Debian to work on the BBB is actually quite easy: http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardDebian#Demo_Image
Next time I’ll promise to make better use of my Google skills.

Hacking an Android TV stick, the sequel

July 4, 2013 jeremyamsynth, android, audio, jack, jackd, kernel, linux, patch, patchset, pi, raspberry, raspberrypi, real, real_time, realtime, rk3066, rockchip, rpi, rt, stick, time, tv, xrun, xruns3 Comments

jeremy@rk3066:~$ uname -a
Linux rk3066 3.0.36-rt58 #1 SMP PREEMPT RT Thu Jul 4 13:18:23 CEST
2013 armv7l GNU/Linux

Managed to compile and run a real-time kernel on the Android TV stick with the RK3066 SoC. Packaged the latest version of amSynth (1.4.0 which has been released recently), installed it, fired up JACK and amSynth and so far no xruns, nothing. And this is with -p64!

jackd -P84 -p32 -t2000 -dalsa -dhw:Device -n3 -p64 -r44100 -s -P

I should measure the latency of the $2 USB audio interface I’m using to find out what the total latency of this set-up is. Well, at least I got the system latency for usage with softsynths like amSynth down to 64/44100*2=3ms. Now that’s a usable situation.

jeremy@rk3066:~$ lsusb | grep -i c-media
Bus 002 Device 006: ID 0d8c:000e C-Media Electronics, Inc. Audio Adapter (Planet 
UP-100, Genius G-Talk)
jeremy@rk3066:~$ cat /proc/asound/cards
 0 [RK29RK1000     ]: RK29_RK1000 - RK29_RK1000
                      RK29_RK1000
 1 [HDMI           ]: ROCKCHIP_HDMI - ROCKCHIP HDMI
                      ROCKCHIP HDMI
 2 [Device         ]: USB-Audio - Generic USB Audio Device
                      Generic USB Audio Device at usb-usb20_host-1.1, full speed

A big pro of this stick is that it suffers less from SD card corruption than my RPi. Yesterday evening I wrecked up yet another SD card when testing my RPi with a real-time kernel, it’s getting a bit cumbersome. Speaking of real-time kernels, it was quite some work to apply the RT patchset to the RockChip kernel source. Had to add stuff by hand and when I finally got everything in place it wouldn’t compile. But I managed to solve all the build errors. After flashing the kernel image the TV stick wouldn’t boot of course, it hung at some point. But I quickly saw that the issue was with the SD card reader and that it was similar to the SD card reader issue on the RPi for which I found a workaround. So I added an #ifdef clause to the RockChip SD card reader driver, recompiled, reflashed and wham, it continued booting. Now I have to clean up my build directory and get a usable diff of it against the pristine RK3066 kernel sources.

autostatic.com

Linux Audio Ramblings

Author: jeremy