Hi Zynthianers,
I love playing piano and playing with Zynthian and Pianoteq. And I feel more exited using Pianoteq on an PC-independend device.
Now I try to get the most out of Pianoteq and Zynthian. A recently updated my Zynthian V4.5 kit (+ Raspberry PI4 8GB) to the latest Zynthian OS - thank to Zynthian developers to make this happen!
Because the default latency is too much for me when playing live I lowered the buffer size to 128bit. This seems to work without overloading the Raspberry. But I also would like to get a higher audio quality and tried to set the Pianoteq internal lowered sampling rate from 22050Hz to 44100 kHz. But this seems to be too much for the Pi4. I get xruns. I also tried to set an overclock option in Zynthians configuration, but then I get some heat problems. So overclocking is still set to none.
When using my old home PC (old i7, 16GB, 4GHz) I can run Pianoteq (Linuxmint, Reaper, Jack) with a buffer size of 64bit, full polyphony and highest quality. I know for sure that this is not a fair comparison to a Raspberry Pi!
Are there some more things that I can do to get more quality and performance out of Pianoteq/Zynthian/Raspberry or is this furthermore simply limited by the Raspberrys performance itself? Would a new V5 kit with more overclocking capabilities help?
Yesterday I mounted this cooling system … it is excellent because it does not invade space (… and it costs very little ) . Today I try to increase the clock…
You can also get these heatsinks/ radiators with fans. I have one which I intend to drive from a temperature controlled driver. My idea is that in low to medium ambient temperature environment, like a studio or when it is idle it would run silent and when it had more work to do, e.g. on stage in a club then the acoustic noise of the environment (including its own sonic contribution) would mask and fan noise. If it is working hard then it should be making a loud sound!
I’ve fitted a Noctua fan, they are famous for being silent… basically you hear the noise of the air. @Riban, I also thought of connecting the fan so that it starts at a pre-set temperature. but i don’t know Raspberry much… i read that it has a temperature sensor on board… is this true?
Thanks
How do I change PianoteQ’s sample rate on the Zynthian? I did it on the Mac but I don’t know how to do it here…Thanks
You set the internal samplerate within the GUI which can only be accessed when VNC is enabled and via VNC but Zynthian resets the internal samplerate each time it starts Pianoteq to half the system samplerate so you would need to do this each time. As I mentioned before, Pianoteq struggles to run at full bandwidth on Zynthian and you will experience xruns if you change its internal samplerate.
Raspberry Pi have several temperature sensores. Zynthian uses the CPU core temperature to warn of overheating. This would be the value I would use to drive a fan. There are descriptions of how to do this on the web. In essence you monitor the temperature and drive a PWM output (or simple GPI for on/off) which in turn drives a power circuit to control the fan motor.
