Pianoteq XRuns

So i’m almost 100% happy with my new Zynthian, except for the fact i can’t run Pianoteq without eventually getting Xruns and sound glitches…

As far as i read / searched in the forum, this is a known issue beucase the lack of processing power of the Pi3.

Is there anything i could do, aside from upgrade to Pi4 ?

Pianoteq was the main reason i got the Zynthian, so if i could make it run 100% would be awesome !

Thanks

Yes there are but you probably won’t like either of them.

  1. Drop the sampling rate for pianoteq even further. Out of the box it’s set at 22kHz. I imagine it will sound a bit lo-fi
  2. increase the jack buffers from 256 to 512. You’ll probably notice a latency increase. i.e. the time in between hitting a key and hearing a note.

Thanks where do i make this settings ?

Pianoteq you need to access the synth gui

jack go via the web interface then Hardware > Audio and tick advanced. Change -p to 512

Hello @thefunkyjoint,

you could ask Pianoteq customer service to provide you with an older not so resource hungry software version.

Greetings and God bless, Marius

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You can set the internal sample rate to a lower figure by editing “/root/config/Modartt/Pianoteq66 STAGE.prefs” and setting . [EDIT] This does not always work. I haven’t figured out what makes the application pick up this config or return to some default. Maybe it is related to the demo version.

Setting internal sample rate to 11025 will reduce the bandwidth to 5kHz and make the piano sound rather dull. It is already band limited to 10kHz which is not great. I look forward to a time when we can play with internal sample rate of 44100 but I suspect that isn’t in the near future!

Jack buffer size of 512 will give 23.2ms latency which will be quite noticable and likely difficult to play well.

Does anybody can suggest a specific version ?

Well in any of these cases i would prefer to live with the XRuns :frowning:

I can get a Pi4 on my city for a reasonable price. How hard is to do this upgrade using the v3 Zynthian kit ?

Um…

I used an electric drill. (I took out the electronics first.)

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Aside from the case modifications, is there anything tricky about replacing the board itself ? Are all Zynthian’s components compatible with Rbpi4 ?

Yep, just the holes in the case were wrong. Everything else was the proverbial plug and play.

Nice ! Even the same Sd card image will run fine ?

Which Rbpi4 model is enough ? 1gb RAM will run Pianoteq fine ?

I think 2GB is the optimal investment :wink:

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Nice , i just bought a Rbpi4 2 Gb ! :grinning:

Does my curent SD card image will run fine after upgrade or do I need to do something ?

If your SD is Buster, it will work out-the-box. You don’t need to change anything.

Sorry for the ignorance, but what means the SD is ‘buster’ ?

What is the name of the SD image file you are using?

This is the file name i used : 2019-06-26-zynthianos-stretch-lite-1.0.0-RC3.zip

This image is not compatible with RBPi4. You should use a newer Buster image:

https://os.zynthian.org/2019-11-26-zynthianos-buster-lite-1.0.0.zip

Regards,

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