Hello everyone in this my first message, hope you can
give me some advice in
this semi-OT question.
I have a clavinova keyboard which sounds are growing tiresome on me. I have
often used my laptop with ubuntu studio and a regular midi-to-usb cable to use
qsynth with soundfonts from my collection grown over the years. This works
quite well, but since this laptop is not always there, and tinkering with
cables is always a bit of a chore, I'm thinking of some more definitive
solution.
One possibility is to have a (preferably cheap) silent small linux box always
on the keyboard. I guess that after the initial setup it should work as fine
as the laptop (although I intend not to have a monitor there, so the aspect of
presets should receive a bit more thinking). One candidate could be this one,
or something along these lines. I should think it would be powerful enough? I'm
not really sure about the CPU demands of qsynth.
http://www.tranquilpc-shop.co.uk/acatalog/T7_Ubuntu_PC.html
Another possibility is some basic stand-alone sampler. I confess not to know
the current hardware that could serve for this, I've always been a PC man. I'd
prefer one capable of using soundfonts, or at least some format to which sf
can be converted, since I'm quite used to my collection.
And of course any other option I haven't think of.
Thanks in advance for any comments,