PiSound, Looperlative, MODEP advice sought

I’d like to get started with the above combination. I’m pretty well versed with Raspberry Pi and had an Elk Blackboard for a little while. I’m looking for something that I can put on my pedalboard that would combine multi-FX (mostly mod/reverb/delay) and looping capability. I already have a few commercial pedals and hands-on is pretty important to me, but I would accept a user interface that worked OK to a tablet such as a Samsung or iPad. I do NOT want to be forced to connect a PC as I imagine actually performing with it. I’m assuming that most everything works as a web interface these days so would be more or less agnostic.

I have a Nektar PACER MIDI pedal which I can bring into service for performance control.

I’m interested in Looperlative and was looking at the actual hardware pedal when I stumbled across the Pi image supporting PiSound. I’m tangentially familiar with MODEP having followed the MOD Audio saga for a number of years, but the only thing of theirs I ever used was the Windows desktop for a little bit. But I’m aware that Looperlative is available as a plugin at least for Mod hardware.

Questions then:

  1. Pi 4 or Pi 5 recommended? I see both are supported now. I have a couple Pi 4s already but don’t really care one way or the other, just want to avoid something known to be problematic if possible.

  2. Use MODEP and try to get Looperlative plugin working in that environment, or start with Looperlative image and try to install MODEP on top of that?

Thanks,

DL

I have looked into the same route and maybe my findings are of any value to your considerations. Quick disclaimer: i am not affiliated with looperlative and did limited research so my insights may not be 100% accurate :

  1. Looperlative for RaspberryPi seems to differ in some ways from standard lv2 plugins in that the os integration seems to be deeper in order to allow application upgrade and configuration through a win/mac host.
  2. While Pisound now works with pi5 (with very good modep performance), the current looperlative image “looperpi16GB.zip” seems to be developed for pi4 and I could not get it to run on pi5. There may be a trivial fix but it may require some more insights on how the image is built.

Maybe there is a chance for a combined pisound/modep/looperlative image on pi5 in the future. Until then my personal choice was to stick with pi5/modep and use one of the less capable lv2 loopers (gxlivelooper, loopor, sooperlooper, alo, …) but of course your conclusion may vary.

Just commenting in case there are follow-ups here. I also recently came across Looperlative and its RPi4 image. Seems intriguing, though I’m more like to try and head towards Sooperlooper on an RPi5 based on what I know and think I know at this point.

I am Looperlative and while I’ll probably offer an LV2 at some point in time, but goal is actually different. I am working on integrating a user-space driver that reduces the looper latency to less than a millisecond. This means that a Pi+pisound will be able to offer latencies that previously were limited to hardware loopers. For those of you doing MODEP, I’ll get an LV2 out later this year.

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I just got my PiSound running on a Pi 4. Interested in looking at Looperlative.

DL

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Used MODEP for awhile, tried the 64 bit version, couldn’t get any CV to work.

Pi 4 1.1.

Now trying Looperlative. I created the image on a brand new 64 GB SD card using the Raspberry Pi imager and can ssh to it over the LAN, however the Looperlative configuration app 3.0.9 on Mac is not able to find it.

I changed the host name to “looperlative” and configured Wi-Fi.

There is another Pi on the network just running regular Pi stuff.

Anyone get it working?

I left out an important bit. When using the RPi Imager 1.8, there is an option to let you set up WiFi, hostname, user account name ahead of time. Setting the user account name to something other than “looper” appeared to kill it. I burned the image again, skipping the OS config part in the RPI imager and now it is working fine. The ssh login credentials are looper/looper in the event you want to log in and configure Wi-Fi and/or other things via raspi-config.

DL

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