Pisound and aeolus, very first questions

I have just received my pisound and would like to use it with aeolus
I have a RP4 with raspian
Have installed the pisound software
I checked with speaker-test and can hear the noise
I have a MIDI cable connected and see signal on red leds

If I try to start aeolus it wants jack
so I start qjackctl and start the jackd
now aeolus starts up and I can activate registers and set MIDI channels, but get no sound
I guess I have to connect MIDI in qjackctl but don’t know what to connect and how.

pointers very welcome

[edit:] I have found a2jmidid
Now I can hear something, but only from the monitor, not from pisound. I do not understand what this a2j thing is really about and how to use it properly. Just made some “random” connections until I got some sound… How do I connect aeolus to pisound playback?

Hi, we’d recommend using Patchbox OS as your starting point ([Beta] Patchbox OS image 2020-11-23) - it has Jack server preconfigured, and also it has amidiauto which by default should handle the MIDI connection between hardware controllers and software programs like Aeolus.

Otherwise, you can use qjackctl or Audacity to configure the Jack backend.

aconnectgui (install by running sudo apt install aconnectgui) is a nice simple GUI for making ALSA MIDI connections - it has always worked better than qjackctl or Audacity for me.

You may also post the output of this command while Aeolus is running:

aconnect -lio

So we can see what MIDI ports are available.

Thank you for your answer :slight_smile:

Yes, trying patchbox first was my plan, I’ll do that as soon as possible.

I made some progress in between:

amidi -l
Dir Device Name
IO hw:2,0 pisound MIDI PS-3QQRNJT

The “hw:2.0” part inspired me to check in qjackctl where I can select that one. I found hw:pisound in “setup”. Now I can hear aeolus on pisound output.
Great, but not enough for me… now I want to understand what is happening :wink:

So I will read and explore more later the day.
Expect more questions to come…

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aconnect -lio
client 0: ‘System’ [type=kernel]
0 'Timer ’
1 'Announce ’
Connecting To: 129:0, 130:0
client 14: ‘Midi Through’ [type=kernel]
0 ‘Midi Through Port-0’
Connecting To: 130:0[real:0]
Connected From: 130:0
client 24: ‘pisound’ [type=kernel,card=2]
0 ‘pisound MIDI PS-3QQRNJT’
Connecting To: 130:0[real:0], 131:0
Connected From: 130:0
client 128: ‘pisound-ctl’ [type=user,pid=1046]
0 'pisound-ctl ’
Connecting To: 130:0[real:0]
Connected From: 130:0
client 131: ‘aeolus’ [type=user,pid=2299]
0 'In ’
Connected From: 130:0, 24:0

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