Reaper on Raspberry Pi 4B . very impressed

Stratavarious

Seems very stable and fast.

gonna add a mini touch screen to the Pi and make it a basic 24 track recorder for our live desk…plug into a monitor after to mix.   

shufflebeat

Ooh!

Following with interest.

octatonic

What audio interface can you use with it?

tampadragon

I’m following this as I’ve been trying to decide on a way to build a hardware editor for some of my less hands on synths. And writing vst editors to host in reaper could be a way forward!

Stratavarious

tampadragon said:

I’m following this as I’ve been trying to decide on a way to build a hardware editor for some of my less hands on synths. And writing vst editors to host in reaper could be a way forward!

The stock reaper plugins look solid so far.  Not a lot or ARM/Pi 3rd party VSTs.. certainly not looked for them.. I will be using IRs for speakers sims and reverbs anyway. 

Loos like you plan to code your own.

andy_k

I had a couple of goes at this, both very successful really, for what they were intended.
First one was built into one of the very tiny armour casings, with a fan built in.
Early on in my research, I found that the Pi works a lot better with an M.2 drive via USB3, so I set up a 256gig external, in a similar small armour case, taped on to the Pi, plenty of fast storage space to work with, and more reliable than reading / writing to a memory card. The memory card is still in there, which can hold as much data as needed, but the whole system boots and runs from the external SSD.
I used this to master a few projects using Reaper, and only the stock plugins that come with it, all very capable.
This was all done on a 4 gig version of the PI, and I have a gizmo on screen all the time showing ram / core /temps etc, no problems with a massive album project with  many stems, 4 gig of ram is plenty.
I took this a step further, with an 8 gig PI, and I used an Argon case, with built in M.2 space, and also a built in fan, this was made to run by simply cloning my earlier SSD onto another one which is permanently fixed inside the case, the only issue I seem to have is a shortage of built in USB ports, the Pi only has 2 USB3 ports, and even using an SSD as a boot drive means one of these ports is used up.
I took this one a little further, and hooked up a Samson interface to it, to try some recording, which I managed, but only spent a little time with it, latency was noticeable, but playback through my amp and speakers was fine.
I also found that the Pi can be fussy about powering drives through it's ports,and soon found that an external powered drive / hub was needed to allow more storage to be used, which meant the power up / boot order became a bit fiddly, hub had to be powered up before Pi, otherwise it got a bit glitchy.
Both of these devices worked really well for mixing / playback of Reaper projects, and Reaper itself does it's own updates, so when you add on the SWS extensions and Reapack package manager, there are more than enough plugins and actions to complete any project natively.
I was using these systems more as home entertainment devices, through my TV via HDMI mostly, but I am sure they would work well in a desktop situation.
The biggest problem seems to be supply, and at one point I had to source a Pi 400, which was available, and is the same machine with 4 gig of ram, built into a keyboard, which is also pretty cool - but does mean that running of an external SSD can get a bit cable unfriendly.
Great machines really, amazing what can be done these days outside the MS / MAC universe.

tampadragon

That’s awesome feedback on this! I use an MPC One as the brain in my setup, so that has low ram and runs on an Arm processor, and the plugins they’ve engineered for that are excellent.
What I have is two M Audio Venom synths which don’t allow a great deal of sound design using the controls on keyboard. 

I’m in the process of designing a new desktop/rack mount setup for them, complete with a newly designed PCB for the controls. For the desktop one I really want to build in a screen with a midi editor running within the Pi, and then more knobs etc to control the parameters when performing, along with the touch screen for in-depth sound design!
it sounds like the Pi4 might be the way to go for this, so thanks!