Hi, so I only just found out about Zynthian after building most of a dawless setup centered around a raspberry pi. Now I’d like to know, can I adapt what I have into a Zynthian-based machine, or are my needs too different?
The basics of my current setup are I have a couple synths connected to the Pi with USB and synced using midi clock. One acts as an audio interface. I have several Python control scripts that do routing and fluidsynth control etc, and a couple daemon-type utility scripts, such as a sysex-to-cc translator and a HiChord-style system that uses my xbox controller. My control scripts use pipewire and evdev as the backend. I expect to be able to route audio and midi internally even on hotplugged devices. Currently I control the system off a phone that connects to a hotspot hosted on the pi.
Assuming Zynthian is compatible with these (and I’m willing to replace the pipewire backend if it’s not a major pain), my next questions are what’s the smallest amount of control hardware I realistically need to buy to do everything on the device & replace the phone? and how could I go about making my control scripts accessible from the Zynthian ui?
Alright, looks to me like Zynthian actually doesn’t handle audio multitracking the way I hoped. Unfortunately that is the only thing I actually need Zynthian for, so I think I’m probably going to go with a separate hardware unit like I originally planned. I might try to rework my scripts to work with 1 dial and a little screen so i can ditch the phone
ok - sounds like you’re all set. Since I started typing this I’ll go ahead and hit reply:
If you want to try Zynthian out and get to know more about what it can do and what it needs you can either use a screen and mouse or a touch screen as minimal controls. I think you’d want 4 encoders to actually use it, although some folks are pretty happy without encoders.
There are 3 fully supported hardware configurations:
V4 (4 rotary encoders, each with a push switch and a screen).
V5 (4 rotary encoders, each with a push switch, 20 push buttons and a screen).
Touch (Touchscreen only)
Other hardware combinations are possible although not necessarily fully supported. You can driver zynthian entirely with a keypad by mapping keys to emulate encoders and switches. (I use this control over VNC almost all the time during development and testing.)
I wouldn’t consider using your existing scripts with zynthian. Zynthian already has its own workflow that you adopt (or adapt via PRs). We currently use JACK as our audio layer. Pipewire is proving challenging to adopt and offers few benefits, but we are likely to need to migrate at some point.
It sounds like you have followed the path that many of us have - designed and/or built your own system then found zynthian that does most of that (and a lot more). I am not sure what your multitrack requirement is. Zynthian’s multitrack audio recording and playback is primative. It doesn’t offer full DAW features but provides a way to capture stems that can be replayed verbatim or processed in a desktop DAW.
It would be great to have you as part of the community if you reconsider whether zynthian is a good fit but of course, music is the aim so don’t spend too long trying to bash that square peg!
Hi, as Zynthian doesn’t seem to have the multitracking capabilities I needed, I instead went with an old hardware unit (Fostex MR-8 mk2) and will be migrating my existing scripts to a one-encoder small-screen setup using Curses.