guide to setup pianoteq on an Odroid C2 headless 'forget and play'

Luba, this is very similar to what I achieved with a NUC last weekend and what I am working on with a pi 3 via Edgar's excellent guide.

I do think posts such as yours and Edgar's represent the beginning of a revolution for PT6. The following combination is what makes this so compelling
- trivially cheap hardware
- auto start
- headless with wireless tablet solution, thus forget and play. This is the absolute killer feature
- latency well below 10ms
- sample rate at or above 44.1khz
- polyphony sufficient for nearly all practical purposes 
- reasonable dac - I'm delighted with my audio engine d1 which arrived this week - lost all that just perceptible but hugely annoying distortion

I'm currently not sure how much if at all I will need to overclock the pi 3 to achieve all this. Job for next weekend.

If you look at the above it makes buying an expensive laptop/pc/laptop suddenly look rather....well....unecessary. Possibly that is why some other posters seem a bit annoyed by all this pi/Linux talk. I would too if I'd dropped, say, a grand on a Mac just for PTQ.

The barrier to all of this is of course that it's fiddly and requires patience and poking around in Linux. Ultimately I wonder if SD card images will be shared on this forum to make the whole thing accessible to non techy types.

I'm wondering if you routed the sound through your Roland piano. I tried this on my slightly old Clavinova (170) and certainly would not recommend.

Would Luba's guide work for the Odroid XU4?

Would it be worth the increased cost?

The guide should directly work on XU4 and any other board dietpi is available for as well. XU4 seems to have a more cores (8 vs 4) and higher single core clock (2GHz vs 1.5GHz) at the 'cost' of a probably noisy active fan.

The question here is, is Pianoteq able to use the full potential of 8 cores?

I assume no one ever seriously tested that. So far, Desktop CPUs were powerful enough with 1-2 cores, pianoteq-arm is still very new and my impression is that the '--multicore max' strategy was implemented specifically to better use the four cores of the pi. In general, the higher the number of cores, the harder it is to make use them.

Performance is good enough for everyday usage, even with heavy pedalling. Polyphony in pianoteq seems to be implemented in an intelligent manner such that a rather 'low' value of 48 does not cancel the longest sounding notes, but the least perceptible ones.

Prebuilt images with let's say pianoteq-demo seems like a good idea, but frustration potential is high if something does not work (happens almost surely to someone). Compared to a good guide with a clean starting point (Edgars guide is very well written), where you can always consult general linux guides, fora, the system maintainer and so on.

1) Those computers are more or less the same size of a credit card, and as they usually feature USB and LAN ports, they can't be as thin as a credit card...
2) Yes, they feature HDMI and, in the case of Raspberry, AV just in case you have an old CRT TV . You can also set the board to see its desktop through the network (with VNC for instance)
3) You can attach a USB keyboard (or a reduced keyboard if this exsist...). By the way Pianoteq has built in the ability of learning to change settings from MIDI commands. There is a user who developed an interface for Pianoteq but I think it is written for Windows. There are other simple options like HMI Nextion LCDs. Sadly, as far as I know Pianoteq has not the ability to send its settings, so devevloping a MIDI interface to change it settings is a bit more dificult...
4) Edgard's tutorial speaks about that point. I have an USB external soundcard (ESI UDJ6) which works well in Raspberry pi 3. In fact it works as bad as in a x86 Windows or Linux PC, with an no acceptable latency.

I have tested an asus tinkerboard and unfortunately its cpu gets too hot very quickly with the stock dissipator, it would need an active fan in order to run Pianoteq at 44kHz.

Hi there!

An update from my side. During the last week I played really a lot on my odroid-pianoteq setup, very happy so far :-). There are two things that I changed:

• In order to signalize that the virtual piano is ready to play, I recorded a short midi file playing only the two notes A-E. My new autostart command now includes playback of that jingle: "pianoteq --fullscreen --multicore max --midi /root/jingle.mid --play"

• Changing internal sample rate to 29 kHz allows me to use 128 polyphony with 96 samples (2.2ms). The higher polyphony sounds to me more pleasing and natural than a high sample rate with low polyphony, when using pedalling, note repetition and so on. Currently, my favourite preset is the rather mellow Steinway D Jazz.

CPU temperatures during normal playing are around 60C. Thermal throttling happen just at 80C and the board was not expensive enough to worry about temperatures.

I think the biggest hurdle for curious non-techies is really setting up the software part of the system. Specialized hardware seems not to be the problem, USB soundcards, digital pianos etc, even a pi3 are probably already present. Maybe one day, someone should really try to provide a ready-to-run image for the pi3, installable in a couple of minutes, with a running vnc server on it, autostarting pianoteq demo, and a ready-to-connect wifi hotspot. Anyone interested?

@Whallsey: Does 'lxsession-default-apps' help? Or the file '~/.config/lxsession/LXDE/autostart'?

LuBa, thank you for your work on this. :-)

I have my RPi system up and running thanks to Edgar's guide and your ideas on this thread.
It starts up completely automatically so I only need UI access when fiddling with settings, and for that I'm using VNCViewer from an Android tablet.

I still have some improvements to make (add a DAC 'hat' and put it in a proper enclosure) but it's working and sounding great already with a USB external DAC.

(Sorry to bump both this and Edgar's threads. Thanks were due).