1Q22 Challenge, Raspberry Pi / Reaper recording studio

andy_k

It has definitely got easier, it must have for me to get this far with it, I don't have a lot of patience either.
The whole point here for me, is to force myself to learn something new, and at the same time get a better understanding of how it actually works.
I haven't got far enough to claim I have reached my stated goal of 'recording studio', but where it stands it can easily function to perform a lot of what I actually do, mixing and editing, and the plugins built in to Reaper can do just as well as some of the mainstream stuff, the Reaper Limiter is one of the best at the moment.
I still find a lot of the basic computer stuff, such as networking, very much 'dark arts', so this is a good excuse to try and understand it better.
 

andy_k

Slight update.
I felt pretty pleased with my progress at the last post, and was beginning to feel pretty comfortable with getting a project open and being able to control with a tablet was promising.
I sat down and made a list of things to attempt, to get it working how I want, OS tweaks, Reaper settings and any niggles, and did a little more research on the background of Linux - file structure, flavors etc.
One of the majot niggles is some scaling issues I am having, menus in Reaper are tiny, although track and mixer buttons are usable, so I went through all the menus in Reaper to see if there are things in there to control these better. There is a 'theme tweaks' window, which has some basic settings, ie 100 / 150 / 200 % settings, and these did seem to help some elements, but not the main menus and options, but it was useful to spend a little time reminding myself where a lot of stuff is changed.
Reaper was playing one of my projects flawlessly throughout, so I thought I would look further into the OS settings to adjust stuff.
There is a desktop settings page, where screen settings are available, and there is an option for 'pixel doubling' which says increases pixels for larger displays, sounds exactly what I need doesn't it? 
So I checked the box, and re-booted, into a black screen with a tiny flashing white dash in the top left corner.
I have seen this before, it is an indication that a boot file is corrupted, shiiiiiit.
A bit of research later, I found it is a known bug, and there are ways to fix it,by editting the boot files on another machine, either a config.txt file, or a disp.sh file buried further into the folders, I am already feeling like an expert now, so, no problemo.
I booted the Pi with my second OS ( Twister ) which I don't really like, and tried to insert my SD adaptor into one of the available ports. Seeing as I had a wireless dongle in one port already, and a USB C power attached, it wouldn't fit. Frustration number 1.
No sweat, I thought, I'll see if I can edit the files on my Chromebook, found them no probs.
Config.txt was easy, just remove a hash symbol and save, but when I opened the .sh file, and tried saving edits, was not happening.
Strange I thought, but it did let me do a 'save as', so I tried that, wouldn't let me rename, or delete original, so I couldn't get it done.
Had a few hours off, to let things sink in, and later decided I hadn't made that much progress, so It might be better to use a fresh OS. 
In about an hour and a half I had pretty much got back to the point i was at when I broke it, with Reaper and a few other things installed, and there was a simple box to select larger displays, which automatically did a lot of the OS tweaks to scaling, still doesn't fix the menu's in Reaper, but I did learn a couple of things along the way, Keep things REALLY simple, and if it's working, don't try to 'fix'it, without a backup of the OS ready.
I think that is today's project, make a copy of the OS, onto the freshly deleted MK 1 I ruined, and do a bit more homework before I get too carried away with it all.
Laters.

TTony

I'll just repeat ...

TTony said:

I admire your persistence!

 

But that's because nowadays I generally view technology as a means - or sometimes an obstacle - to an end.  It's the end that I want to get to as quickly and painlessly as possible.    I understand that a large part of your challenge is to get the tech working, so congrats on the progress!

andy_k

Todays progress,
Decided to go mobile, took the Pi, leads and wireless keyboard / trackpad round to my mums, to see if it would work on her TV.
She has a slightly smaller Toshiba than mine, same aspect ratio though, so I thought I would see how it functions offline ( not signed in to her wireless)
Few hiccups with the settings on her TV at first, meaning menus were off screen, took a bit of jiggling on her ancient remote to fix it and it was working fine, bit fiddly without a mouse attached, but good enough to let her hear my 'portfolio'.
Needless to say, she was completely in the dark over what I was trying to explain to her, and I will be reminding her of this when her Chromebook breaks and she has to get a new PC.
I'm 56, so she's no spring chicken, but what I learn from it will obviously be helping her out at some point.
Band practice tonight, so more progress will have to wait.

andy_k

Todays slight progress.
Thought I'd take a moment to backup my progress so far- to be on the safe side, so I used the built in SD copier to write a B copy of my OS, over the previous corrupted version,  had to format the card first, but it went pretty smoothly. 
Swapped over the cards to check it was working, and the new version became my working OS, with my previous version marked as OS-A, so if it goes wrong I will be back where I started, with Reaper, and Quake plus a few others installed, plus all my preferences on the desktop, cool., took about the time it took to do the washing up.
I thought I'd try and go a little further, so I copied a few files and folders across, to see if I could get the Web Remote working, and it has been a while since I set it up, but all went well, simple case of setting up a different port in Reaper and using a different homepage on my tablet, so now I have 2 options for controlling Reaper from my tablet, or I can use different devices for each.
Theres a bit more to do to set it up, I only have the default set of commands to work with at the moment, but it won't take long to get to grips with it again.
Happy with that, so I thought I'd see what happened if I plugged in an IO???
First one to have a go with is the Samson G track, which is a bit of a clumsy thing, but looks cool, and is actually quite useful.
It is a USB condensor mic, with an audio interface built in, and headphone monitoring, I plugged it in while I have a project playing, and immediately my HDMI audio cut out, so I checked the options and tried one of the other things that looked promising, ALSA, which had settings for audio in and out, in seemed like the right choice, but HDMI out didn't seem to work so I went with another setting and tried headphones into the Samson, it has built in vol control and this seemed to be good, but I didn't really want to use headphones, so I connected an MPOW blutooth sender to send BT to my stereo, couple of clicks and now my audio is going via BT to my HIFI, the neighbours will love me.
I know by now I am pushing my luck, but I couldn't resist trying to use the instrument input, so I plugged in my last Firebird build into it, which has a very hot humbucker, and after altering a few settings I was getting a clear signal, obviously with a fair bit of latency.
I created a new track in Reaper, armed it and tried it out, first attempt produced a stereo track, with only one side recording, the Samson has a 3.5 stereo jack for input, and I am plugging a 6mm mono guitar lead in to it, so that was a setting to change, second attempt, with input monitoring turned off got me a latent recording of a full  DI guitar track.
I havent tried to improve latency yet, and I am obviously monitoring over BT, so didn't expect good results, but at low volume iI am able to get through a track acoustically in time, and can shift my audio manually in Reaper, this was just a test after all.
I have the buffer set to 512, and am getting 10ms of latency in Reaper, so for recording, I would be dropping the buffer to something like 64, so there is definite room for improvement and I am very happy with the Samson for it's options.
All the audio I recorded is stored on the USB stick I am running my project from, so there seems to be no impact on the OS I am working from, and the project can easily be transported to my main machine for full works with VST amps etc, so I'd say today has been a success.
Maybe the challenge for me has nearly been met?, only outstanding thing is another IO and fader control, via Zoom R16, everything is stable and I just wish I could get an 8 gig Raspberry Pi to complete my original plans, looking like March for supplies to resume at reasonable prices, but I think I am officially a Pi-Rat now.

andy_k

Not too much actual progress here, just a few attempts to live with the RPi as something to easily get into.
I can't actually fault the Pi for doing what it does, it just seems to be at the point where it just works and anything I want to do actually just works. The problems seem to only arise if I try to implement something new, but then I have to remind myself what I am actually dealing with, a tiny collection of components, and an open source software environment.
I still haven't managed to 'fix' my scaling issues, and I think that is down to my own lack of understanding rather than the hardware / software, I am trying to use a TV as a computer monitor, and some of the software needs to be optimised for a TV use. The main software I am using here is Reaper, and that is so deep for customisation itself, that I prefer to keep a lot of things set to defaults, just to make the experience familiar across all the OS I use.
I still find it easy to use the RPi file manager, virtually same as Windows explorer, to connect to my network and to see my WD network drive, and once it is mounted, I can access my video and music library which can then be played back via VLC, haven't yet managed to make it visible without mounting it manually though. VLC can play through a directory on my SD card, Home folder, and I think that is fine for now, another USB drive with films and media just shows up as a mounted disk and files are playable with same software.
I can also connect to my Humax freeview recorder, which has a lot of stuff recorded on it, although I no longer have it connected to an aerial, ( cancelled my TV license), so at least I can see the network even if it still seems to work like magic ( still doing some research on this, always been a bit of a mystery )
 Sound on the Pi, as in Linux, gets a little complicated, but the Pi OS seems to have a neat way of dealing with it, as by default the audio is being sent via HDMI, or blutooth if a device is connected. I am doing most of my experiments by simply allowing audio to be played back through the TV, and it is interesting how well a lot of my own mixes translate through this less than perfect medium, I think of it as the modern version of mixing through NS10's, and it is probably better than the ear bud / phone speaker experience we try to make mixes fit anyway.
I din't do as much as I wanted with it this weekend, but I did manage to use a few of the native Reaper JS plugins on my previously recorded DI guitar, a distortion into an amp /speaker sim, into a chorus delay, and I must say, despite the basic nature of the plugin interface, the results were acceptable. 
This work was done on a review version of the track, and it prompted me to open up the original version of the track, which is a stemmed out mix, and I had a little fun editting and mixing some strings that I hadn't included in my review mix, something I had recorded 18 months ago, so it was nice to revisit.
During all of this messing about, I am curious as to how the Pi is actually performing, and have installed a neat monitoring tool called Conky, which displays information such as Ram and processor use and temperature on screen, and it is a fascinating thing to see really, the processor in the Pi 400 is set slightly higher by default at 1.8 Ghz, due to some built in thermal management, but of course the first thing I did was to overclock it to 2 Ghz, and I am pleased to see the temps are well below average while I am using it, I enabled a swapfile, I don't really know why, but am really not even using half of the Ram on the device. It is useful to be able to see what is happening, as it is happening, so it is still part of the ongoing experiment, still seems like an 8 gig Pi 4 is looking like early March at reasonable prices, but by then I might be able to utilise some of that extra RAM, at the moment, 4 gig is fine. and the Pi continues to amaze me.

andy_k

Just a small update,
Saw a video stating that 64 bit version of RPi OS was out of beta, much better performance, apparently, so I thought I'd give it a go - spare SD card, so why not.
Simple processes get easier the more times you do them, so within about half an hour I was back at the log in state, having to put in my WIFI password, job done.
About 10 mins later, I had a few essentials installed, Conky, to monitor resources, and Commander Pi, to overclock it, so now it is running as snappily as expected, watched a couple of Ghost vids via YT, while I installed Quake 1 and 2, and re-booted a couple of times to let things settle, all updates done, so I tried my USB drive, which has ARM version of Reaper ready to install.
Had a few probs here, seems something wasn't working with the install, so I had a look to see if there was a specific 64 bit version to DL, and there was an earlier version for Aarch which was labelled 64 bit, so I thought I'd give it a go, it works fine, and opened up a previous save of my last recording project which has a few native Reaper plugins running.
I'm starting to understand WHY a lot of vendors do not support Linux, it is too cutting edge and hard to keep up with, but in a way I actually like the challenge here, I feel like it has forced me to get a greater understanding of how a lot of this stuff works together, and I am glad that there are many many people out there grafting away to make it work.
In a way, it is the same upgrade path we all get on with Win and Mac, except, with Linux you only have yourself to blame if it breaks.
I must admit, I am finding the Conky resource monitor fascinating, as it is showing each of the 4 cores of the processor in real time, plus Ram and Temp, and as it stands, the Pi isn't really breaking a sweat during my work, heat is something I have no control over as the processors are built into a keyboard with just a fairly big passive heatsink to provide cooling, but I can see I would have to push it fairly hard, for a long time before temps would cause any issues.
Work continues on the new 64 bit OS, still amazed at what it can do.

andy_k

Update,
completed project detailed in voting thread. here-

https://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/222276/1q22-build-challenge-finished-projects-post-here-no-comments-please#latest

Jalapeno

Just a suggestion Tracktion's Waveform (Free) runs native on Pi (Raspbian Buster), as an alternative to Reaper.

andy_k

Thanks, I'll have a look.