Dear Community, is there a way to speed up Zynthian startup in seconds by preloading for example just a pianoteq preset? Thank you
It’s actually probably the inverse to your suggestion. Zynthian loads a snapshot at startup and if that snapshot is large or has slow loading engines / presets then the overall startup will be slow. By default Zynthian loads the state when it was closed down but you can configure it to load a default snapshot instead.
Thanks Riban, for the by now usual speed in answering. Let’s put it this way: my zynthian takes about 30 seconds to start a screen with a pianoteq preset. It’s normal? is there any way to improve this?
Also, is it possible to disable services I don’t use to improve startup times?
What would be an acceptable time period? The Pi itself takes a certain amount of time to boot, and as riban says it has a lot of stuff to load up especially if you are loading big sf files or similar.
I have a reset button on my pedalboard that pulls the enable pin on the Pi itself low to allow me to kick it and force a restart. And that certainly takes the sort of period of time you describe. I switch the audio in to bypass whilst this is going on so I do, at least, have guitar audio routed past the rebooting zynth but it’s certainly a performance issue, but it’s one ultimately you have to consider.
One possibility would be perhaps to reboot the zynthian GUI rather than the whole pi but the reason for doing such a thing is may well be the GUI is misbehaving. It doesn’t do this too frequently but I have known it, so that wouldn’t be optimal, unless you put the reset switch on the far side of a MIDI message or similar and call it remotely.
I tend to leave my zynth’s on, pretty permanently, and generally they seem to behave themselves. Restarting can be an issue if you implement it for some reason. I have multiple machines and the pedalboard sends MIDI PC change across Ethernet that I expect other machines to pick up and react to. So I can reload a zz3 from one of those buttons if need be.
Sorry if this seems a little evasive but an exact use case helps us see if there is some way of improving the situation.
I did a bit of work a while back looking at improving boot experience but didn’t complete it. I believe there could be slightly shorter boot time and more feedback on boot process but Pianoteq takes about 10s to start and load an instrument so there are limits. There aren’t really any service worth doing. If you have WiFi enabled it might be worth disabling.
Thanks Wyleu and Riban, it may seem paradoxical but it is nice and reassuring to know the limits within which you can move, it helps you make your decisions better.
Also, I wondered if I can keep restarting it and turning it off simply by activating a general switch on which I have loaded most of the instruments (monitors, keyboards, various sound modules, etc)?
I agree! Knowing constraints allows much more effective use of a system.
This should be okay. Zynthian is designed to minimise the impact of abrupt power down. You should avoid doing so during write operations, e.g. when saving snapshots, running loopers, recording MIDI or audio, etc. Also the last state will not be restored - this is saved during a manual shutdown / restart. There is a small risk of corruption but due to the design decisions this has been minimised and experience shows it to be extremely rare (or non-existient).
This is great news for me. Thanks again Riban