Advices to buy Rasberry 4 and soundcard for Pianoteq 8 pro

I have installed Pianoteq 8 onto my RPi 4 4GB and it works very well.
It also has a hifiberry Dac+ Pro. The hifiberry has way too much latency. I haven't tried it with DAC2 HD (I have one of those in a separate Pi for hi-fi streaming). I would not expect the latency to differ. In general I think that DACs that are made for listening and streaming do not have adequate latency for interactive playing.
So I have to use my RPi with a USB audio interface (I use a Scarlett Focusrite 2i4). It has great latency and great sound. Probably most audio interfaces will work well if they are designed for low-latency. You would do better IMO to leave out the internal DAC and spend the money on the audio interface.
The other important thing that gives you is:  control over gain and output levels (critical), good headphone output, midi over USB, and quite a few other advantages.
I wanted to have this all in one box, but have decided it isn't possible--unless I build my own box and put the RPi and the audio interface in it.  :-)

Well since you are getting the hifiberry, give it a try, and maybe you'll find better results with it than I did. It's worth experimenting. Please post what you find.

However I've tried with several dacs meant for hi-fi use (usb) and it's not a knock against hi-fi berry or the others--but the use case for streaming music which is what most are designed for is very different than the needs of musicians who are interacting with them. If you think about it a 50 ms latency added to a hi-fi streamer is nothing, nobody will complain who is listening to music over that, even through an awesome system. It's only when you try to output that sound, hear it, respond, repeat, over and over multiple times a second (as we do playing the piano) that this issue comes up. (I'm sure gamers are another use case where it's a big deal).
Even if there were no latency, I couldn't get a signal out of the hifiberry or any other dac I tried that was powerful enough to adequately feed my active monitors (speakers). Pro audio equipment (which is the kind of gear you usually want to play through) tends to have different signal level expectations, and the audio interfaces provide input gain and output volume level adjustment which makes it easy to find the perfect sweet spot of sound. Without that my hifiberry output sounded weak. There are several good audio interfaces under US $100.

I found I was not able to get low enough latency using a card on the RPi. Im not sure you’ll find one that’s faster than the hifiberry, I am saying that the overall latency, from the time you play the note until your ear hears it, requires a low latency audio interface to get what I feel is adequate results. This is a good article explaining why any computer sound card, regardless of computer, will usually not be as good as a dedicated audio interface.

         https://brianli.com/how-an-audio-interf...roduction/

For example, a Focusrite Scarlett Solo costs about $100 US, and I those should work seamlessly with the RPi (I have two other models of the Scarlett and both work out of the box — without special drivers). That’s about the price of a hifiberry Dac2HD I believe.
You plug your keyboard into one of the RPi USB ports, and the audio interface to another.

If you are intent on using a pi hat card, this looks interesting: https://blokas.io/pisound/
It looks like the functionality of a low-latency audio interface on a card. I’m interested to hear how well it works.
I still would choose an audio interface for the extra controls and I/o ports. It’s so nice to have a physical volume or gain knob to adjust while playing. And you have a fast high quality headphone output separate from the speaker outs. And you can plug in a microphone. Possibilities are endless.  :-)

Hello,

Thank you very much for your responses. That's a shame I just bought all my raspberry stuff !

I think I do not get what is an "audio interface", I thought this was just a name for a sound card, but is seems thats something specific.

Then, I'm not sure to understand, because you seem to say that a computer/rasberry cannot be low latency, but in this case, what, with an "adio interface", will run Pianoteq and deliver the audio signal ? I'm not sure to get the whole processing chain...

edit : oh, ok, it seems you talk of using your audio interface WITH Rasberry, so yeah I think I really dont understand the difference between what you call audio interface and a wifiberry, which I thought is also an audio interface.

edit : about your post kanefsky, I guess this is another Raspberry-type mini computer ? But how Pianoteq run on this OS ? Is it based on linux too ?

Yes, it's another small-form-factor computer.  It's basically a very small PC, so it can run anything you could run on a PC including Windows and Linux -- either of which can run Pianoteq.  It can do everything a Raspberry Pi can do plus a lot more, and it's also a lot more powerful.  On a Raspberry Pi you have to reduce the Pianoteq quality settings because of the limited processing power, but on the MeLE you can turn the Pianoteq settings up to higher quality.

I would agree with this.  The exception is if you're pretty comfortable with technology and want to setup the computer to be headless so that you can literally put it out of sight and pretend that your piano has built-in Pianoteq.  In this case you would either have one piano sound that you almost never change, or if your piano has any MIDI controls you could assign those to do something like change presets in Pianoteq.  It's possible to make the Raspberry Pi (or the MeLE or any similar SFF computer) act like a hardware module, so that you just turn it on and it works without ever needing to know that it's a little Linux computer running Pianoteq.  That's how I had mine setup.

If you want to have full control over Pianoteq at all times then you need at least a touchscreen if not a monitor+keyboard+mouse, in which case it's really not a great choice versus an old iPad or laptop or whatever.

It will depend mostly on which headphones you're using and what volume levels you require.  High-impedence and/or low-sensitivity headphones will probably require a headphone amp if you want good volume levels, but some headphones may work fine without one.  The headphone amp could be a simple analog headhone amp like a Shiit Magni or it could be a full USB DAC + Headphone amp like a Topping DX1.  Both are only about $100.

The best I ever got on my overclocked RPi4 with realtime kernel and all the optimized settings and whatnot (based on the pianoteq-pi github project) was in the upper 20's.  On the MeLE I got in the mid 50's.  I don't have either one setup at the moment and it's been a while so I don't remember every detail that well.  Right now I'm just using an early 2020 M1 MacBook Air that gets 123.  Now that Pianoteq is available for iOS an old iPad would probably smoke them all as well.

That should be pretty much identical performance to the Quieter3C that I got, so it should run Pianoteq quite well.  The main difference is that the one you're referring to is bigger and has a fan, whereas the Quieter3C that I got is smaller and fanless (it uses the more power-efficient N5105 variant of the CPU).

Thank you again for the heads up on these amazing fan free mini pcs. I took the plunge and bought the MeLE Quieter 3Q. It runs Pianoteq beautifully! I am quite amazed at how well such a small form factor pc can do so.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09XPTKQRW/...rd_plhdr=t

I also bought a 7 inch touch screen monitor which I use with it. I bought these to use in church as they are easier to carry than my laptop which needs an external fan as the internal fan has packed in. I didn't fancy lugging these along with my PX-S5000. The mini pc and mini monitor will fit in a small bag or even in one of the two pockets of the dedicated PX-S5000 carry case.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Portable-Monit...dd101b8590

I'm getting great performance from this new setup even though I've done nothing to maximize performance. I will most definitely need to do so though to get rid of things like Windows noises etc, etc.

I would humbly recommend these MeLE QUIETER min pcs to anyone who needs a small and silent setup for gigging.

Warmest regards,

Chris

Red Means Recording just did a little stress testing on the MeLe mentioned in this thread, thought I’d share it here as I found it interesting: https://youtu.be/TdQK8Jh9H6o