Seaboard Block + Pisound odd behaviour

Pisound Projects
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I’m experimenting with MPE (Roli Seaboard Block) and Pd. So far I’ve managed to made a poly synth patch that responds well to MPE (I’ve borrowed the polyphony distribution solution from @thetechnobear awesome Brds MPE pd patch). It works well on my PC but after firing it up on Pisound I’ve experienced an odd Seaboard behaviour - it randomly stops sending MIDI data and I’ve got stuck MIDI notes. In order to restore it I need to switch the Seaboard off and on and change Pd MIDI input port to anything else that dev2 (Seaboard in this case) and back do dev2. It’s probably not a Pd error because the same thing happens when I’m using Seaboard with any virtual instrument in Reaper.

Is it possible that Seaboard is not getting enough power? (RPi 3 B have USB 2.0 ports, I’m running it using dedicated 2.5A USB power supply)(Seaboard battery is almost full) or is this somehow a problem with the MPE data amount (USB 2.0 vs USB 3.0 speed)? (for this patch Seaboard is set to 4 voice polyphony so only MIDI channels 1-4 are being used) :thinking:

It’s most definitely not a Pisound problem but maybe someone can point me in the right direction, all suggestions are welcome :slightly_smiling_face:

P.S. Just realised that I should probably check if it happens when Seaboard is connected over Bluetooth with RPi. (EDIT: not sure if RPi 3 B/Raspbian supports MIDI-over-Bluetooth)

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Hey, check if dmesg log contains any errors when the MIDI issues occur. You may post the log here for us to take a look as well. :slight_smile:

Regarding MIDI-over-Bluetooth, I see statements on the internet that support for it was merged to ‘bluez’ (bluetooth system library for Linux), but I can’t find any references on how to make use of it on Linux…

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I’ve discovered that while being on windows I occasional do get the message in console

warning: MIDI timing FIFO overflowed

when Seaboard is set as MIDI input device in Pd. Upon further research on the web I came across couple of post about this issue and in one of those was this great explanation about why it may be happening. TL;DR: battery powered MIDI devices are often sending continuous Active Sense messages (part of MIDI System Realtime commands) that Pd does not like.

The solution will be to find an app that can filter MIDI realtime commands out (if the device does not have an option to stop sending them - which Seaboard does not)

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