i’m new to Zynthian. successfully installed zynthian in raspberry pi 5. i was trying to do synth layers, i read in forum that it can do using lv2 plugins. but i cant see the LV2 Plugins menu in my webconf . is it removed from webconf? can someone help me?
Hi @aslambabu!
A warm welcome to the zynthian family. I hope you find it as wonderful as most of us do.
Please start by reading the docs available on the wiki.
Most instruments and plugins in zynthian are LV2 but are not specifically marked as LV2 plugins. You add chains with instruments and / or MIDI / audio processors. By adding a processor you are offered lists of catagorised plugins. You can change the catagory to see different lists, e.g. Distortion, Delays, etc.
Thank you so much for the reply. Definitely it’s a wonderful software. I had read some part of the wiki , and there it was like, LV2 Plugins menu in webconf under the software menu. So I think now there is no seperate menu for LV2 Plugins and LV2 Plugins are under the engines menu, right?
Also I’m a software developer with around 20 years of experience, I’m interested to be part of this development. Will be helpful if you can share some links or details on how I can start contributing
Once again thanks for the reply. And have a nice day
Search the wiki. There are some developer guides.
We call the units that do the audio / MIDI processing, “engines” and an instance of an engine is a “processor”. (In fact, an instance of an engine may provide multiple processors, e.g. we only run one Fluidsynth but present it as individual engines.
Okay. Thanks
@riban i tried to use surge xt synth in both raspberry pi 4b and raspberry pi 5, some presets working in both, but when i load some other presets like strings , no sounds coming also showing red warning icon at top right corner. actually surge xt wont work properly in zynthian? or have any issue in my setup?
Surge XT is a might beast with a lot of complexity and some high demands on resources. Many of its features work on a RPi5 with proper cooling but some patches will drive it beyond the available CPU capacity. It is included because it is such a fantastic synth and some users find or create some patches that they are happy with. I like the synth but have not had time to play with it much and don’t know which features are particularly demanding or what combination will drive the zynthian into overload. A RPi4 is likely to fail quite quickly although we do have some success on the lighter patches. Any RPi without good heat management will fail. The better the heat dissipation the longer before such a failure may occur and with sufficient heat dissipation and sufficiently low CPU load the onset of failure does not occur. You may also find that some soundcards burden the RPi / SoC / CPU more than others. I have a cheap and nasty USB stick that is awful and causes the zynthian to fail quickly but some other USB soundcards are fine.
So, it depends on your hardware configuration and the selected patches.
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okay, thanks for the reply, which type of cooling system is better?
In zynthian we have a passive heatsink bonded to the metal enclosure which transfers heat to the external environment quite effectively. For a custom RPi5 build then the official Raspberry Pi 5 heatsink with fan works well.
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thanks for the reply