The Dream: To make songs where the only percussion is swords. Sounds of swords clashing together, being unsheathed with a shiii-iiiinng and clanking around.
The problem: Though I’m generally a competent programmer and technologist, I’m completely ignorant of most things involving digital audio.
What I have:
- Pisound on a pi 3b
- Electonic drum kit (Alesis Nitro drum module) for the midi controller w/midi out
- A half-hour of audio recording of me clanging swords together to sample from
I looked at building an LV2 plugin from scratch, but this seems daunting: LV2 programming for the complete idiot
So according to this video, think I can make things happen with Orac:
Consideration: I have my pisound set up with an older version of the blokas OS, lsb_release -a says I’m running Raspbian 9.4. I think this was before they started calling it patchboxOS. So I think that will have to be updated. I want to keep my pedalboard settings, so I tar’d the directory /usr/local/modep/.pedalboards and saved that. Will that work?
Does anyone have any experience with this kind of thing? WILL ORAC MAKE MY DREAMS COME TRUE?
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Yes, you should be able to just put your pedalboards to /var/modep/pedalboards. Just in case, keep your SD card as is, or back its contents up into your computer, and try out the new version safely, see if it works well for you. The latest version contains updates for all plugins and MOD software that had changes at the time it was built (~2020-02). That may make something incompatible with the old version.
Regarding sword sounds, it sounds like you’re after a sampler plugin or software to which you may simply import your samples, and play around with them using MIDI. Likely ORAC has a sampler module you could make use of.
I meant to get back to you a couple of weeks ago, but damn I must not have sent whatever I typed.
I got something working!
So, ORACs’ documentation is entirely in the form of a couple of different videos. I had no idea how to run the program or what it even was.
For anyone who see’s this: ORAC IS RUN FROM PUREDATA. ITS A BIG PROGRAM BUILT IN PUREDATA.
It took me a long time to figure that out.
So I got ORAC running from the patchbox cli command, and i heard the lil starter beat. But thats about all I ever got it to do.
I ended up starting from square one and figuring out puredata. Caught some tutorials and read some docs, AND I GOT A POC WORKING, heres a lil video. 
I know theres another dude who was looking to do this on the forum somewhere too. I will get this patch up on GH and make it awesomer when I find time.
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