SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Gearnews has an article about use of Raspberry Pi microcomputers in digital signal processing (DSP) systems, observing that digital synthesizers are essentially computers in specialized housings. In addition to the complex software, there is a lot of work in making an enclosure with useful controls and displays. Increasingly manufacturers are building their synthesizers around the Raspberry Pi:
The biggest synthesizer manufacturer to make use of the Raspberry Pi is Korg. The Japanese synth company's Wavestate, Modwave and Opsix digital synths all make use of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module. (They're in the module versions too.)
In an article on the Raspberry Pi home page, Korg's Andy Leary sites price and manufacturing scale as the main reason Korg decided on these components. He also liked that it was ready to go as is, providing CPU, RAM and storage in a single package. "That part of the work is already done," he said in the article. "It's like any other component; we don't have to lay out the board, build it and test it."
The software for each instrument is, of course, custom. The Raspberry Pi, however, generates the sound. "Not everyone understands that Raspberry Pi is actually making the sound," said Korg's Dan Philips in the same piece. "We use the CM3 because it's very powerful, which makes it possible to create deep, compelling instruments."
These used to be designed with off-the-shelf parts from Motorola and Texas Instruments. However around 20 years ago, according to a Raspberry Pi link about Korg synthesizers, Linux entered synthesizer production scene.
Previously:
(2024) Berlin's Techno Scene Added to UNESCO Cultural Heritage List
(2021) The Yamaha DX7 Synthesizer's Clever Exponential Circuit, Reverse-Engineered
(2019) Moog Brings Back its Legendary Model 10 'Compact' Modular Synth
(2014) History of the Synthesizer - 50 Years
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 28 2024, @01:19AM (1 child)
Doesn't seem trivial to get below 1ms or even 3ms
https://www.reddit.com/r/DSP/comments/12rbsj6/unable_to_get_low_latency_audio_throughput_using/ [reddit.com]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35056094 [ycombinator.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rich on Sunday April 28 2024, @04:14AM
I don't know what's going on there, but with 100 ms latency on a 1 GHz+ machine, something's royally broken. The thread posters you quoted don't make an impression as if they know what they are doing. Compare that to this thread https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=308134 [raspberrypi.com] where the OP complains about 50 usec outliers.
Linux IS rather complex, so I explicitly mentioned a stripped down kernel, rather than something where systemd and a WiFi stack are involved. I maintain software for a device with rather complicated robotics communication that has a MIPS-like soft core CPU in an FPGA running at 50MHz and I've never seen latencies over single milliseconds, even without Preempt-RT. However, this is a custom kernel I built with everything unneeded stripped out, a buildroot-created busybox userland, the application, and nothing else.
But look yourself for how to do it, Korg actually uses Linux (and not some closed BSD) and you can look at the sources here: https://github.com/korginc/wavestate_OSS [github.com] (It does shock me a little to even see Python and Perl in the list of components...)