Rock64 single board computer + DAC for Pianoteq ?

Yes, that's no doubt due to the much faster DDR3 RAM vs the Pi's DDR2. CPU is the same with a moderately faster clock speed. I'm going to give the ROCK64 a go - seems like one of the best performance per buck SBC's around.

It will run Debian, so that's a good start. If I was looking for a general purpose SBC, I'd definitely go with the RPi3 for the reasons you've stated. But this will be a single-purpose computer, dedicated to just running Pianoteq, so I'm hopeful. Also the fact that the vendor sells a DAC to go with the main board is promising.
https://youtu.be/ZejkWra-Mfc

The performance of the different ARM boards has been disappointing. Most of them seem to have a PTQ Performance Index of around 12-15. The Odroid XU4 looked promising but nobody has got it running yet. (FWIW I compared the XU4 to the other CPUs in Mossy’s benchmark thread and it lands around a PTQ PI of around 30).

In the meantime, inexpensive x86 CPUs are faster and keep getting better. The low-end Pentium N4200 has a PTQ PI around 30 and companies like Minix sell N4200 Mini PCs for around USD$300.

It should get interesting in the next few months. Several Mini PCs are scheduled to be released using the Celeron J4105, N4100 & N4000, all of them have similar performance to the N4200 and are priced from under US$200 on up.

You can compare systems on Geekbench 2.

Here’s a comparison between a MacBook Pro (i3-3227U) and the older XU3 running Ubuntu (same CPU as the XU4).
http://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench2...90/2581032

That's strange,
I run pianoteq on a orangepi pc.
It is running armbian, which is running stable on a XU4 too. So I would imagine it's a minor issue and pianoteq will run on a XU4.
If someone has this particular error message for me I might be able to help.

See this thread ... https://www.forum-pianoteq.com/viewtopic.php?id=5405

There are so many dirt cheap corporate off-lease windows desktops on the used market (kijiji, ebay, local resellers) that I can't even justify using any new NUC PC or mini PC, etc. I use a USFF Dell and a SFF HP, both have i5-3570, 8GB DDR3, hard drives and legal win10 licenses for CAD $120 each (under $100USD). Good enough for any general work, VST, and/or Pianoteq.

If you need ultra-small for your application, I get it, but for me I can't waste the money or time to get things working right on an ARM when an old $100 computer will still overperform.

Seems like the only advances made in consumer-level processors are in power consumption, i.e., phones. If / when there is a version of ptq that can run on an old Nexus 5 or similar used phone (although stock Android has terrible audio latency built-in), then things might get interesting (using iGrand on Android is not amazing).

Pianoteq 6.1.1 works perfectly on an Odroid XU4 with Armbian. It takes some tweaking like building a preemptible kernel and manually setting the core clocks and the core affinity to use the available resources in the best way possible.

I'm running PTQ on a XU4q (the 'quiet' version without a fan) at 44.1k with 96 voices and 2ms latency. This setup is extremely stable and I couldn't be happier.

The XU4 is also significantly faster than the Rock64 or the Tinkerboard. I would also strongly recommend against the Rock64 in particular, because it has a design issue with the power supply that takes some effort to work around for stable operation.

Andreas

It makes quite a difference. The shorter time slices and especially the realtime scheduled interrupts allow to get much better performance at lower buffer sizes. I can only highly recommend it. Modern kernels also support the so called rt-basic configuration that does not implement full preemption, but it turns out to be perfectly sufficient for audio.

There are HDMI touchscreens that work with the XU4. But I guess you want to use it with what you already have. I don't use any screen at all. I run headless and for configuration I forward the GUI to a remote X-server.

Andreas