I’ve just bought a Pisound and got it all set up, and I’m wondering - is it possible to output audio over USB and/or MIDI in via USB from my MacBook?
For example: if I connect my IPad Pro to my MacBook, it sees it as an external audio source so I can run audio from iOS directly into Ableton, for example. I can also route MIDI from Ableton out to iPad apps running in AUM.
Is there an equivalent way to do this with the Pisound/Patchbox? To treat it as, essentially, a USB audio/MIDI interface as far as my Mac is concerned? I’ve searched the forums but I didn’t see any obvious answers.
I can of course run analog stereo from the Pisound to my Mac’s external audio interface, but I’d rather eliminate the middleman. How about Bluetooth MIDI? I’d just rather avoid hours of messing around if anyone knows these answers already. Thanks!
I haven’t attempted this, but it looks like Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 can run in USB OTG gadget mode.
In that case, you have to configure the USB functions implemented by Raspberry Pi using the configfs interface, in particular, the UAC (USB Audio Class) function.
See these links for documentation:
In addition to this, you should look for USB Gadget advice specific to Raspberry Pi’s, to see whether there’s any RPi specific config.txt changes necessary.
These docs should provide some ideas for keywords to search for on the Internet.
Keep in mind that this is generic to Linux and Raspberry Pi, so you don’t have to focus your search on Patchbox OS.
As a first step, getting Raspberry Pi get recognized by the host computer implementing any USB function like USB Serial, Network or any other kind of USB device would be a great starting point. That’d mean you have the USB functions working properly, the remaining part would be to configure the UAC function correctly, and it will likely would appear as a new ALSA audio device for you to use, which you could link with Pisound’s input and output.
As for Bluetooth MIDI - I think I saw something specific to it in experimental section of BlueZ (Linux Bluetooth stack), that had to be manually enabled. It might be necessary to have some daemon running too to make it work. I’ve briefly looked into this a few years ago, and determined some configuration had to be done and additional software had to be set up, hopefully these days it’s in better shape and more straightforward.
As a first step, it may have required making a custom build of BlueZ to enable MIDI support, some details here: BlueZ with MIDI over BLE Support