Introduction and First Impressions

TL;DR: if you’re on Ubuntu, use RealVNC.

Hey everybody! I recently discovered and purchased an Organelle M because all my friends have been talking about their recent synth purchases. And although I have been a staunch experimental computer music person for the past 15 years, I decided to look into the most recent offerings – since it seemed to me that the (excessively expensive) analog navel-gazing moment seems to have passed to a certain extent…

I’ve been using Pd for about 15 years, and in the past 7, I’ve used a Raspberry Pi 2B for live performance: wireless controllers, microphone and instrument processing, etc.

I immediately jumped on the Organelle because:

  • It’s a compact and portable package that provides just the right amount of physical interface for my needs that I never really got around to building for myself on the Pi
  • orac – yet another one of those things I always wanted but was too lazy or distracted to do myself. Typically, I’d create a script for each gig to launch pd instances, including a networking patch to connect them to osc/midi messages/each other as needed

So as this sort of dev-oriented user, here is what I had to adjust to since yesterday:

  • the file system is read-only by default, and for good reason
  • but I wanted to use the Organelle in a specific way that required a lot of reconfiguring
  • specifically I was used to patching directly on the pi from my ubuntu laptop via X11, which I prefer to VNC because it essentially moves the gui rendering overhead to the more powerful machine, and is typically visually sharper and more responsive
  • i could not get X11 to work
  • i also couldn’t get regular VNC to work using 3 different Ubuntu VNC clients (Remmina, TigerVNC, and some other lesser-known thing)
  • finally I tried to X11 and VNC from my Mac. X11 failed in the same way as before. Screen Sharing app didn’t work for VNC. Finally I downloaded RealVNC and it worked.
  • then I tried RealVNC on my Ubuntu laptop (my preferred machine) and it worked!

So I reflashed my Organelle (to get rid of all my hacking) and I’m going to settle on using VNC for now and get on with the whole point of purchasing the Organelle, which is to worry less about being a sysadmin.

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Awesome to hear that we have a new experienced PD user in our community! I hope you decide to port some of your patches to the Organelle for use :slight_smile:

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Thanks! I got stuck on my first project, which was to stream internet stations.

If you could take a look at my post on that here: Pd-extended mp3cast~ crashes

And perhaps bring it to the attention of anybody who might know how best to proceed?