actually, you are right Ben.

I intended to prepare RPi to use some external battery to play "on street", or somewhere more mobile, instead of taking my precious VL70m synthesizer all the time.

Thank you for reminder. You say "rapid stuff gets laggy", I will try it anyway, using minimalistic raspbian and some performance tuning, but thank you for your "kind warning", will keep it in mind. Will try to use some more simple soundfonts (but probably not any "cheap" 8-bit like synthesizers..)

Regards

Milan

2014-02-24 20:44 GMT+01:00 Ben Bell <bjb-linux-audio-user@deus.net>:

On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 07:09:06PM +0100, Milan Lazecky wrote:
> i have a yamaha wx5 (midi saxophone). i was thinking to use my midi2usb
> cable to plug into raspberry pi which would use some fluidsynth soundfonts
> to synthesize music realtime.

There are some examples of people trying to do this and I think the general
impression is that the latency is touch and go depending on what you're
playing. I have one here running fluidsynth, alsa midi using an Evolution
USB keyboard, and a set of mellotron soundfonts. It's OK for chords and
single note runs, but if I try anything rapid, it feels laggy. Of course,
compared with a real mellotron that's not so bad, but playing a WX5 may be
sore.

As others have pointed out the audio out isn't audiophile quality, but I'd
have thought if you were in a studio you'd use proper hardware and this
would be for live use? In which case, factory in an amp, an audience talking
and so on, and I don't think it's as big an issue as people make out.