19th July 2014
the raspberry pi is a great little cheap piece of kit. It has a decentish amount of CPU and has a debian based distro for packages. Nice.
Based on the work done by Jeremy on his AutoStatic.com website, it's relativly easy to get linuxsampler up and runing on the rasberry Pi. The instructions that i followed were here At this page There are also some optimisations he has written up on this linuxaudio page
I followed his instructions, and added his launching script, which hopefully reduces the CPU load on the device so it can get a bit more power out of it.
Unfortunatly, linuxsampler didn't work straight out of the box. I had to pull apart his script a little bit to see where it was failing. I was getting a mesage "FATAL: cannot locate cpu MHz in /proc/cpuinfo" This error message was coming from jack. This is a description of the problem
Anyway, i changed the .lscp to only use ALSA and not start Jack and it works, but there is a lot of cracking etc. especially with more keys being played. Sometimes there is even pitch changes.. I added a different Piano sample file that was a lot smaller. This gave quite good improvement. I need to now look into what the optimisations there are. It probably also makes sense to set up a cross compiling build with the patches needed to make jack work, as it really does only need the Audio stuff...
In Summary, the steps I followed for installing linux sampler on the Rasberry Pi was as follows: