[LAU] Raspberry PI and PISound

[worik]

On 22/07/20 10:10, Kevin Cosgrove wrote:
> I'm sorry to say that I don't have such experience with Pisound. But, 
> it seems pretty cool. Could you do us the favor of reporting back on 
> what you find?
> Good luck, and thanks much!
>
> On Tue, Jul 21, 2020 at 3:05 PM worik <root at worik.org> wrote:
>
>     Is anybody out here in LAU land have experience with PISound?
>
>     https://www.blokas.io/pisound/
>
Sometime later

The Pisound has been quite good for me.

I use it for audio in (effects processing for an electric guitar, and 
soon voice) so there are four choices that I know of for Raspberry Pi

1) Pisound - What I have

2) Flatmax cards.  As far as I can tell they are out of business.  I can 
find no user reports that have anything good to say about them and a few 
bad reports

3) Zynthian They make a kit that is a complete (?) synthesiser. They are 
out of stock, and are not keen on selling the card separately.  But they 
are very responsive, and suggested I contact them in two months and they 
might be able to help.  We will see

4) Hifiberry - These are a possibility for me, I have not tried any out 
yet.

I am happy with the sound quality, input and output.

The Pisound is not perfect.  My gripes are (very personal. Others have 
different requirements):

It is stereo and the audio inputs/outputs are 3/4 inch stereo jacks.   
Almost useless.  I am in the process of rehousing the system and 
breaking out those stereo jacks into mono jacks.  I need to treat each 
channel on its own.  I really do not know what they were thinking, what 
uses a 3/4 inch stereo jack as an input?

It pays a lot of attention to MIDI.  So do I, but I do not want my sound 
card paying any attention whatsoever to MIDI.  It has two MIDI ports, 
which these days are of no use, all my equipment has USB interfaces, 
only some have MIDI jacks, and none has only MIDI jacks.  I have also 
had to purge some of the utilites that came with it that tried to be 
"smart" about MIDI connections.  I do the smarts around here, I prefer 
my computers fast, quiet, and dumb.

The very worst aspect is the lack of commitment to Free Software.  Their 
OS they derived from Raspberian has telemetry built in, a fact I 
discovered debugging network communications - found some network 
connections back to BlokasLabs - I spat the dummy and complained to 
them.  They made some excuses then went quiet.  I can find no source for 
any of the drivers for the cards, for the telemetry ("trust us" they 
said, really?) and so on.

I am having terrible problems with Jack (e.g: bazillions of 
'JackAudioDriver::ProcessGraphAsyncMaster: Process error' in syslog) but 
I do not think that is the fault of Pisound

All in all I think it is quite a good sound card.

Worik


-- 
     If not me then who?  If not now then when?  If not here then where?
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     root at worik.org 021-1680650, (03) 4821804 Aotearoa (New Zealand)