10 Sept 2016

Notes on using SamplerBox.org on a Rasberry Pi Model B.


After being put onto this by a friend (Hi alex), I spent this arvo checking out Samplerbox. It's a RasberryPi program and system image. It's basically an appliance thing. (I'm not really sure how one describes these things)

the key steps to using it are:

you can do extra stuff, like add hardware for a MIDI In port, and some LED indicators to tell you which patch number you're on, and Patch Up/Down buttons as well. but you don't have to, which makes it super quick to get up and running.

The recommended way of getting started is using the image and writing it to an SD card, but there is a sourcecode repository for the Samplebox python application as well. So i did that. And it does what it says on the tin. Which is great!
I am doing my testing on the original RPi B, so performance wise it's not the greatest.

I'm using a mac, so to write the image to the sd card, you need to use diskutil to unmount the SD card so you can then use dd to write to the card.
Assuming your SD card is disk2, (you can check this by going diskutil list ) you would unmount the card by going
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2
and then to write the disk image do :
dd if=samplerbox_20160831.img of=/dev/disk2 BS=1M
You'll either need to be root, or using sudo to make this work.

An update. There is a faster way to write the SD card images documented on This page
Apparently using the raw /dev/rdisk is faster.

My first testing was done with the internal sound card, not a (recommended) USB one since i'd have to find a USB Hub.

Initial Impressions:

Things to do next are to Try it with a USB Audio Interface and there are also some patches for changing velocty responsiveness

So some further testing this afternoon involved testing it with a USB Hub and USB Audio interface