It is nice to make new friends and that is what happened last night at a club night that was mostly concentrated in the north west section of our globe (or the top right corner for the flat earthers) with a brief representation from our Antipodean correspondent.
Can we rescue old zynthians that suffer low memory with NUMA emulation and/or zram? We have previously discounted these but now that we are trying to keep RPi3 running with more challenging OS, we may revisit this.
Talking of RPi3, a lot of time was devoted to trying to fix a V3 showing seg faults - we failed!
Some stories from NAMM include mention of Roland’s new V-Stage and Behringer’s BX1 - you may guess which was preferred by the ensemble.
Nord seem to have cornered the professional performing keyboardist market.
Musical instruments are often invented to reduce the size and cost or existing instruments, e.g. the Wurlitzer 200A was a classic tines piano and the Hammond B3 the tone wheel organ, both making far more affordable and portable versions of their respective forefathers.
Replacing an upright piano, owned for 70 years with a modern digital may be emotionally challenging but can be worth the expense.
Zynia (zynthian on RISC-V) has stalled slightly due to technical challenges, mostly relating to porting to Debian 13 (Trixie) which has better RISC-V support but zynthian needs attention to run on it. We expect some pull requests in the post…
Do we keep our old musical equipment, even if we have seldom used it and unlikely to do so in the future? (Anyone want to buy a Behringer Composer? It is an audio compressor - oddly!)
Plans for a Steamboat Willie watch were resurfaced with concern about legal challenges. This discussion may have been triggered by questions in the forum about copyright. (Beware of asking questions for which you don’t want to hear the answers.)
Creating stubs from a mixed audio file were remembered… and forgotten. It can be / has been done on zynthian so maybe it might happen again…
Auto accompaniment rhythms could be added. Who wants; bossanova, polka, tango, samba, merengue, beguine, latin & rock?
Long after we dropped to just two, there were lessons in pdb - The Python Debugger which led to the discovery that that afore mentioned V3 is seg-faulting when it tries to run Tk(). That is quite a problem, but not for zynthclub to fix.
Holy moly .
I do hope that it will hit the stores as late as possible, because by then I will have to have concocted a plausible explanation for my wife, like I have felt compelled to finance an interplanetary charity to grow crops of aubergines on the moon, for the greater good and better future of humankind…
NUMA emulation can make RAM access faster for Pi4 and more so Pi5. This does not work for older Pis. Memory-starved Pis would probably profit from enabling zram which is a well-known mechanism to trade CPU for RAM. While no panacea, this would probably be useful for anything with less than 1GB of free RAM and maybe even the ones with slightly more RAM.
Agreed! If someone wants to add a feature request for admin / webconf options to enable zram and NUMA emulation then they may be considered for a future release…
I reimaged the V3 (Rpi3) with oram-2412 image and it is now working fine. It did have a 16GB SD card (now has 32GB) which I think is a bit slow and maybe was corrupt. I was able to flash the new image, boot and update to oram stable without issue. (It takes a while!) Also enabled VNC - so all good with the V3 so far!
It’s been a while since we met. How about a chat next week? I want to see in what state our German friends left the clubhouse. I expect they cleaned up and put everything in its correct place. We need to get back in and return the appropriate level of chaos.
To get us going, I propose Monday at 19:00 UTC but am completely flexible so please offer alternatives if you want.
Reminder: ZynthClub today, 7th April 2025 at 19:00 UTC. Please check your local timezone as daylight saving is changing around the world at this time so club may be at a different local time to what you may think.
We had a long and fruitful evening with representation from Europe and USA. (I continue to consider UK as part of Europe - geographically.) The talk often swayed into subjects that I now forget but here are some of the things said and done:
An album of new tracks is imminent from one of our long time friends which unfortunately features zynthian less than we might hope. We look forward to an anouncement and launch party soon.
Much of the vocals were recorded at Pirate Studios which offers low cost, minimal studio access and has locations in various countries.
Attendants were treated to a preview of new developments but remember the first rule of zynth club…
There was praise for the addition of JC-303, a TB-303 emulator. More acid!
Adamsynth have anounced a patchable analogue synth with total recall and full MIDI control.
How to help a non-technical friend fix their non-working zynthian over the phone… using a phone app like fing can help find a network device on your LAN. (I just tried fing and it finds hosts on my network and looks up their MAC so it can show the manufacturer, e.g. Raspberry Pi - handy!)
Fans of 2001 - A Space Odyssey may like to see 2001: The Alternative Trip, an alternative second part, aligning more closely with Arthur C Clarke’s words.
Sometimes (very often) a £100 guitar is all you need and sometimes it turns out to be worth much more.
Moony is a LV2 plugin in zynthian that allows LUA scripts to manipulate MIDI, although I could not get the editor to populate in VNC desktop - I thought it had worked before.
Pocket Master from Sonicake is a small, low cost (£50) guitar effect with USB audio interface that can be plugged into zynthian using its hot-plug USB audio feature. You get a lot for your money and with a rechargable battery and small footprint it is very portable.
It was acknowledged that zynthian documentation is suboptimal and it is a challenge to find the effort and enthusiasm to update it. There was a suggestion of using machine learning to provide access to documentation. NVIDIA have RAG which helps retreive relevant documentaton. Maybe we could encourage some of our community with experience in LLMs to work up a PoC implementation that uses zynthian and third party (e.g. LV2 plugins) documentation, forum and source code to provide a question & answer based documentation interface. With some up-front effort we could see a automated documentation system that may only then need a brief product description written to give users knowledge of the features that they could consequently investigate with the ML interface. Volunteers???
Between 10-20% of what was said had to be cut… but it was the best meeting. The greatest! No other club meetings are as good. Everyone says so. They say, “Zynth club - it is the greatest. I wish we could be as good.” But they can’t. If you don’t beleive me then join next time - losers!
.
