Hi @hannesmenzel,
A bit off-topic respective to the fairly technical inclination taken by this thread: what specific Streinway D large-scale soundfont are you talking about? It is an open-source or commercial library? Just curious.
BTW, you are quite conversant in electronic engineering, for a self-defined total Raspberry newbie!
Best regards 
There are 3 pianos from user āDore Markā on pianobook.co.uk which sound quite good. Iāll anyway will reduce the storage footprint a bit. They are free and available in sfz, but I do not recall the licence details. (Edit: Steinway, Fazioli, Yamaha, maybe others, but the new Bosendorfer is a demo wirh a nod to the new commercial stuff)
What I am talking about here I learned from reading this board since I got my first pi in November I think. At least I had some low level linux and scripting experience before. But any kind of electronics make me sweat, and I just soldered guitar cables before.
Yes. They operate in parallel and can be stacked as you will. The only one to be aware of is the zynaptik board this has the digital and analog connections on one of the 40 pin connectors whilst the other one is exactly the same as any other pi 40 pinconnector.
Of course, Pianobook, thanks for the hint @hannesmenzel 
.
Lately I am a bit perplexed by the continuous Chris Hensonās paradigm reshuffle of his former brainchilds Labs and Pianobook. He is still obviously very much behind them, which is a good thing imho, but personally I donāt buy much into the current hyper-sampling hype, with the market flooded with too much makeshift commercial offers.
Maybe itās just me, and my ageing memories of the 90ās, but I miss those times when Eric Persing did sampling marvels for Roland with one-two orders of magnitude less in memory size. This being said, Pianobook is a wonderful initiative, and I appreciate the idea of part-time samplists supporting somehow their hobby financially.
Regards
Hi @Aethermind , Iām not sure how much Mr Henson is still involved. At least heās out of Spitfire Audio and imo gave the lead of pianobook to others after the controversy where he felt the urge of sharing his thoughts about trans people with the audience (Donāt get me wrong, Iāve nothing against sharing opinions publically, but Iām quite annoyed how āconservativesā are oftentimes most interested in the life reality of other people which should not bother them at all).
I got into this wonderful project (zynthian) lately because I was searching for a decent and affordable portable keyboard extender, and I think itās beatiful. Besides some publically available sfz I also managed to script some libraries with other formats (kontakt, with convertwithmoss as a starting point) to sfz and try to build a collection of what you might have in other stage pianos/workstations with good quality samples. After diving into sfz scripting I realized that you can have some incredible results if you have already good sfz instruments with at least 2 velocity layers and most of the notes sampled by scripting your own velocity crossovers and velocity based filtering, fake RRs, even shared extras like key noises, release samples, pedal noises and so on. But of course I have to dive deeper into it I have to evaluate the licences.
Maybe we could open an sfz sharing thread.
Towards the main topic: I ordered a bunch of stuff yesterday and hope I can make something out of it:
Iāll get some balances I/O jacks somewhere else. Letās see how clumsy I am.
This is how itās suppose to look like in the future, just imagine 4 moog-ish encoders on the right:
Yes, I think that this was due to a certain notorious Hensonās āintensityā of character, and was probably a bit magnified and overstated by the web, but these are the inherent risks of being an exposed online figure, and one should be aware of them, learning to moderate and filter some highly contentious opinions.
This definitely sounds like a fantastic idea!
Regards
Oooh, thatās a great idea.
Hereās a couple I know of other than PianoBook:
https://freepats.zenvoid.org/
(the mappings repo is for sfz definitions of sample packs available elsewhere)
I also appreciate the idea, but maybe weāll do that in a seperate thread?
No, I exchanged things in my checkout card for more than two month trying to think of everything I might need for my further zynthian build. What I did not expect though was that the hifiberry board might not be suited to sit on a pi5 with the official active cooler mounted on it.
So what would you do? Hifiberry recommends not to put anything else in between (like pin header extentions). I could try to unmount the cooler, but I donāt know if that is a good idea (and can be done undescructive)
Iāve stacked them in all kinds of order. Not had a problem as yet.
Iāll get a picture of the element in the cajon. Hi fi berry pro ad dac an amp card and a power supply management board on top of that.
@hannesmenzel You chose the hard way. I tried it several times, didnāt make much progress, and then this finally helped:
https://wiki.zynthian.org/index.php/Building_Zynthian_MINI_V2
Itās worth a look. I built a Zynthian with the Mini PCB into a different case, with a different display. This PCB will solve all your wiring and connection problems, even if you are thinking of a different design.
Thank you very much! I think that this is a wonderful project, but 1) this does look like the hard way for me (build your own pcb), 2) I would have to stick to the design due to my limited understanding, but it doesnāt feature some specs I need (audio input).
It must be somehow possible to connect the things I have now at home to just feature the two things I need:
Iāll try the header height expansion, otherwise Iāll remove the fan. But the MCP23017 encoder connection still doesnāt want to enter my brain.
I already struggle with this, heres the mcp I bought:
You donāt need to build a pcb, nobody does, you can order here: zynthian-mini-V2-rev2 - Share Project - PCBWay
I have a Hifiberry DAC+ADC with audio input, attached to the Mini board. With this board you dont have to worry about the wiring of the Raspberry Pi, the MCP23017, the encoders, the buttons and the audio hat, all of these are ready.
Finally got around to photoing the back of rack6 an zynaptik board pi to pin with a pi, but no audio boardā¦ Itās All pretty flexible.
Thanks! Some questions though:
What I was thinking of:
Mcp to Pi:
Mcp to encoders:
VDD is the board power supply, so the + (3.3V)
VSS is the GND so the -
RC where do you see it? I donāt know what it isā¦
INT is linked to a Pin that you can select from the drop-down menu on WebConf.
MCP23017 int A-Pin To control Pins A (A0, A1, A2 etc etc) and
MCP23017 int B-Pin To control Pin B (Bo, B1, B2 etc etc)
On WebConf remember that the A0 pin of the multiplexer corresponds to the number 100 to be inserted. A1 = 101, A2, = 102 etc.
This is my configuration:
You donāt need mcp23017 or any other multiplexer if you just want to add encoders to your setup. There are enough available pins to connect 4 encoders and their switches directly to rpi.
Read this schematics how to do that and how to configure webconfig.
Absolutely right.
