Pianoteq Load Balancing Hack

Software
1

Hi,

I was able to get a crazy performance boost out of Pianoteq on the Odroid N2+ by using a load-balancing hack - basically I dedicated 4 out of 6 CPU cores to Pianoteq.

The reason I’m asking here, is, I’m wondering if this hack can be applied to the Zynthian/Raspberry Pi 4 to give it a similar boost? While I like my Odroid N2+, I like the connections on the Zynthian even better!

On the Odroid N2+/Ubuntu I start Pianoteq like this:
taskset -c 2,3,4,5 ‘Pianoteq 7 STAGE’

On the Zynthian/Raspberry Pi 4 I’m guessing it might look like this:
taskset -c 2,3 ‘Pianoteq 7 STAGE’

You can read about it here - Insanely great performance on ARM-64bit (Pianoteq, Odroid N2+, Linux) (Page 1) - Pianoteq user forum - Modartt user forum

2

Hi @GrooveOn Welcome!

I see no discernable difference running pianoteq on a Raspberry Pi with and without this setting. I think Pianoteq’s multicore support already optimises it for the Raspberry Pi. Maybe the Odroid doesn’t support that option. I tried on both RPi3 and RPi4. Shame this isn’t a magic power boost.

3

Thank you for checking . What are your Pianoteq settings when you apply this?

The recommended Zynthian settings are:
Internal Sample Rate = 22050
Max Num. of Voices = 32

Are you able to use any higher settings at all?

For reference, I can use these settings and still get clean MIDI playback.

Here’s a comparison using the same settings.

With load balancing

Without load balancing

4

I tried with 22050 and 44100 and the behaviour was similar for each test with and without taskset. I am eager to be able to use Pianoteq to its full potential but it is more important to avoid xruns hence it sits at Zynthian default 22050 samples per second.