Pianoberry – Pianoteq 8 @ 1.33 ms latency on Raspberry Pi 5

Pisound
71

Thanks Elektrofon! It’s all working now, and doing exactly what you said: Switch on and play without option paralysis. :slight_smile: Awesome! Here are some tips that might help future users:

  • Depending on your headphones (I have Bose QC15s), you need to add a headphone amp. As Elektrofon suspected above, the Pisound audio output is indeed too weak and may sound muffled otherwise. Others have reported the same issue elsewhere on the forum. I bought a simple “cooidea” headphone amp from Amazon for just 24 € that works well. It even has two stereo inputs so I can now feed in music to practice to. It’s so tiny you can stick it to the side of the PiCase and power it from the PI’s USB-A port (cable included). You’ll just need to adjust the volume at your sources, because the amp has no controls.

  • If you have a calibrated custom note-on velocity curve, you also need to copy that over; otherwise your Pianoberry piano will play and sound differently (mine still sounded more muffled than on my MacBook, for example). Instructions below.

  • If you make a mistake during installation and need to reinstall, do not deactivate your license — you cannot reactivate it on the same hardware and will need to contact Modartt. You can see your licenses online in your User Area under “Manage Licenses”.

So my path to success was this (with Pianoteq Pro Studio 9.1 and a Mac):

  1. Download the latest pianoberry source code from github to your Downloads folder and unpack it. The result is a folder pianoberry-main if you download the current project source code like me. I will use this as my starting point for the file paths below. (If you download a release, it will be called pianoberry-1.2.0 or similar.)

  2. If you have (global) custom velocity curves for your keyboard: Find your Pianoteq preference file. On a Mac, hold down option and select Library from the Go menu in the Finder. From there, navigate to Application Support/Modartt/Pianoteq91.prefs and open it in TextEdit. In that file, find the following section and copy it (your actual numbers will be slightly different, of course), then open the file pianoberry-main/pianoberry/Pianoteq.prefs and paste that section at the corresponding place (it was right before the end of the Properties for me):

<VALUE name="global_velocity_curves”> 
<state enabled="1”> 
<noteon x="0, 0.0787402, 0.340332, 0.44357, 0.637795, 1" y="0, 0, 0.251969, 0.503937, 0.755906, 1”/> 
<noteoff x="0, 1" y="1, 1”/> 
<sustain x="0, 0.08, 0.582677, 0.92, 1" y="0, 0, 0.5, 1, 1”/> 
</state> 
</VALUE>

(You should be able to use the exported .mfxp file for this instead, but I was not able to get this to work.)

  1. Download your licensed full version of Pianoteq for Linux from Modartt (mine was called Pianoteq 9, with a space). Move that file into the folder pianoberry-main/pianoberry/

  2. Edit the file pianoberry-main/pianoberry/build (not the one in the folder above) by changing the three six-digit numbers as follows to make the image big enough for this version of Pianoteq (thanks to @bidinou!). Don’t accidentally delete the s behind numbers 2 and 3! (Don’t ask.) Note: This may not be necessary for earlier versions or those with very few instruments.

dd bs=512 seek=511999 of=pianoberry.img < /dev/null
parted --script pianoberry.img 
mklabel msdos 
mkpart primary fat32 8192s 255999s 
mkpart primary ext4 256000s 100%

  1. Download, install and run the Docker app. You can quit the app again, you won’t be using it, but this launches the service (or daemon) that needs to be running. On macOS, it shows up as a menu bar icon.

  2. Open the Terminal app, then enter cd Downloads/pianoberry-main/ and then ./build. If you’re repeating this after an error, use ./build --force-rebuild instead. This will download lots of stuff, then go quiet for several minutes while it’s building the disk image.

  3. Insert a µSD card (with SD card adapter) into your Mac. The smallest card will do; Pianoberry only needs a few hundred MB. But card speed will impact boot times. My Raspberry Pi 32 GB card boots my Pianoberry in 22 seconds. Download and run the official Raspberry Pi Imager App. Select your RPi model, then on the next screen scroll all the way down and select “Use custom”. Navigate to the file in pianoberry-main/deploy/pianoberry.img, then select your inserted SD card as the target.

  4. Re-insert the SD card (it mounts as “pianoberry”), open the file config.txt on there in TextEdit, scroll to the end, insert your Pianoteq serial number, and set your preferred preset (I use “NY Steinway D Binaural”, for example). Check the exact spelling of the preset in the Pianoteq GUI on your computer. Save the file back to the card and eject it. Tip: I use BlueHarvest to remove those nonessential Mac-specific invisible files like ._SpotlightV100 before ejecting SD cards.

  5. Connect the RPi and Pisound to Ethernet for the one-time license activation, insert the SD card, connect MIDI in and audio out, and power it up. After about 20 s, it’ll blink bright red, indicating it’s ready to play. If you forget to activate, there will be no sound at all; just connect Ethernet and power-cycle.

That’s it! I hope this helps more people get started with @Elektrofon’s excellent Pianoberry!

5 Likes