Modartt Pianoteq 6 on Organelle

Organelle
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I’m really enjoying the Organelle (especially thanks to Orac) and have written a few PureData patches. Going into the keyboard/mouse/monitor setup and then disconnecting when playing gives me unexpected joy coming from a Mac based Max/MSP setup. Very good!

Anyway - I’ve just noticed that the newest version of Modartt Pianoteq 6, which I currently use heavily on the Mac, says that it supports the ARM architecture on Linux. If I could get that to work, that would be a very unexpected perk of the Organelle.

For anyone with more knowledge of Linux and the Organelle hardware - is it worth going down this rabbit hole? Will I be able to get something this external to the Organelle to work screen-lessly with midi and the audio outs without spending a year on it? Will the tiny processor be able to keep up? It’s a pretty light processor load on the Mac.

Any input appreciated.

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I’ve not tried, but I doubt it’ll work well - last time I read the forum some were saying even on a rPI it was not performing well.
( it uses a license allocation and I’m dont think you can revoke it if you don’t end up using it, which is why i didn’t bother)

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Well, if you haven’t tried it, that probably answers the question about feasiblility.

Regarding the license, I recently bought a version of the player (or whatever the least expensive one is called) for my son’s computer. I’d probably use that license for this experiment.

Since there are three seats there, I’d gladly donate one to you for experimentation purposes if you were so inclined, if that is allowed.

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unfortunately you cant transfer seats across users :slight_smile:
but honestly that’s not the issue, I have a license , and there is a ‘provision’ in the license where you can write to pianoteq for more ‘seats’ and also revocation, which I could easily justify.

its just I don’t think it’ll work well, so the effort.

(bare in mind here, im an avid Organelle fan, and also an avid Pianoteq user… its awesome, so id love it to work :slight_smile: )

I just checked on the pianoteq forum (who know they might have improved its efficiency on arm), and current reports of it working ‘ok’ with some audio issues (glitches) on the r3b , and better on the 3b+ ( I have both, I could test on, but time is not on my side )
so from a tech point of view… I think its going to be a bit worst than that on an Organelle. (lower clock speed)

so I think, for low polyphony it might more ok…

BUT… for me , its why use the Organelle?
for me a piano needs velocity, so the Organelle keyboard is a no-go,
so I might as well use a rPI3b+ with a velocity sensitive keyboard :wink:

of course, this is personal ,
and I could be completely wrong… but with so many possibilities that the Organelle has, I tend to try to ‘choose my battles’, and play to the Organelle’s strength.

all that said, if someone tries this, Id love to hear the results, and be delighted to hear I was wrong :slight_smile:

small tech notes for anyone trying this:
Pianoteq are distributing binaries, so the options they use for compiling are optimised for the rPI3, this might be sub-optimal for the Organelle which has a different CPU … also I don’t know if Pianoteq is multicore on the Arm compile - if it isn’t, the Organelle might fair better, if its multicore (which I think for osx it is), the Organelle will be no match at all.

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Well thanks for the information :slight_smile:

I suspected it wouldn’t work great and trust your opinion. If someone ever does get this working, even for something like 4 voices, I would love that.

I’m not super familiar with where the processing boundary of the Organelle is yet - the most extreme thing I’ve done is a handful of patches in Orac (thanks for that by the way) and I haven’t hit the practical limit yet.

It’s a really wonderful box, I didn’t even know something like this existed and bought it approximately 60 seconds after I saw a product demo video.

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yeah, don’t let my view above seem negative…

even though I had similar platforms (rPI3 and Bela) before I got the Organelle,
Ive was still pleasantly surprised by the performance of the Organelle when I got it,
Similarly when I initially tested Orac, I was again happily surprised at how well the Organelle performed :wink:

( Id had a backup plan that Id release it rPI3, so quad core, if it hadn’t but the Organelle relegated that to Orac 1.1 :slight_smile: )

could not agree more…
ironically, because I had other (similar) products I hesitated, but wish I hadn’t :slight_smile:

Organelle (like many in fairness) is all about what you can do with it, so focus on the here an now with it … we are in a fantastic time.

funny it reminds me of my teenage years, hacking personal computers - ZX81, Spectrum, C64, BBC , Atari - fun filled days, which are hard to related to now, hell my phone has many times more power! yet, these are days Id never swap!

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