Pi 3, SooperLooper, and UMC-404HD audio interface

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Digital Larry
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Pi 3, SooperLooper, and UMC-404HD audio interface

Post by Digital Larry »

Few months back I was using SooperLooper quite a bit with Ubuntu Studio 19 on an old Athlon based machine.

I found a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B 1.2 with 7" LCD touch screen laying around and wondered if it would run SooperLooper. It turns out that SooperLooper and QJackCtl are included by default in the Raspbian repos, so I got those downloaded and both running. I was able to plug my Macmillen Softstep MIDI footswitch into the Pi and control SooperLooper. Rad!

However the audio interface (Behringer UMC404HD) doesn't show up as a JACK device. It does show up as an ALSA MIDI device.

I'd be pretty happy if I could get this going to just record 2 or 3 tracks, then put the thing on the LAN with SAMBA to make file sharing with the DAW easier.

Anybody get a Behringer UMC404HD running on a Pi? I'm not fixated on this audio box, I just happen to have one and thought I'd try to get it working. Any good quality stereo interface, preferably with MIDI, would be fine.
Last edited by Digital Larry on Sat Nov 09, 2019 4:13 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Pi 3, SooperLooper, and UMC-404HD audio interface

Post by Digital Larry »

Going through this guide, will see how far I get.

https://wiki.linuxaudio.org/wiki/raspberrypi
Last edited by Digital Larry on Sat Nov 09, 2019 3:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Pi 3, SooperLooper, and which audio interface?

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

Ha ha. What a coincidence. I've got the same audio interface (Behringer 404). Jack would crash every time. Thought that it was my Raspbian installation that was faulty. Nope. A cheap Aliexpress audio interface (link) would not crash Jack. My guess, after trying everything, is that it is a power issue. And, alas, no: using the power adapter does not help...

P.S. I have a Pi 1B+.
Last edited by Linuxmusician01 on Sat Nov 09, 2019 3:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Pi 3, SooperLooper, and UMC-404HD audio interface

Post by Digital Larry »

I'm pleased to report that I have achieved some success.

I think that on my Ubuntu Studio PC, I didn't have the onboard audio enabled, so jack defaulted to hw:0 which would be the 1st USB device or the Behringer. On the Pi, the onboard audio is hw:0 and the Behringer USB is hw:1. I started jackd on the Pi command line using -dalsa -dhw:1 and lo and behold this works in the effects loop on my Eleven Rack. I am getting some xruns but I've done nothing to try to optimize the system per all the tips in the link I found. Just one track so far but like I said I only need two or three.

I am getting some recorded burbles/glitches but have now managed two tracks. Those glitches will be a show stopper if I can't resolve them. Other than that these is not a lot of extra noise coming out of the audio interface that I can tell. Based on my experiences with PC Linux and audio, I think that a real-time kernel might be an appropriate first stop.

One thing I'm wondering about is whether it makes more sense to try to adapt SooperLooper's slgui to the Pi display (slgui is too wide, and I already determined I don't really need about half of the buttons on there), or to just run sooperlooper headless and use TouchOSC on one of several Android tablets I have laying around.

FYI I am just using the Raspbian Buster build:
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ cat /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)"
NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux"
VERSION_ID="10"
VERSION="10 (buster)"
VERSION_CODENAME=buster
ID=raspbian
ID_LIKE=debian
HOME_URL="http://www.raspbian.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianForums"
BUG_REPORT_URL="http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianBugs"
pi@raspberrypi:~ $
Last edited by Digital Larry on Sat Nov 09, 2019 3:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Pi 3, SooperLooper, and UMC-404HD audio interface

Post by Digital Larry »

First I am going to mess with the JACK (jackd) settings as I noticed one of the parameters was set to "2" when I started up via QJackCtl whereas the page I was reading about Pi said to set this to "3". If I can get away without need to build the real time kernel I'll like that, though it doesn't seem too difficult, I've said that about several things and have been wrong.

Next thing I investigated is the slgui code. I think it's a better idea to try to hack slgui to change the layout/remove unused buttons, as this already has the OSC integration and MIDI/keyboard learning built in. There is a toolkit called wxDev-C++ that apparently is a GUI IDE that lets you build up UIs that use wxWidgets as does slgui.

http://wxdsgn.sourceforge.net/?q=node/2

Sadly, it only runs on W-word, but one uses what one can get.
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Re: Pi 3, SooperLooper, and UMC-404HD audio interface

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

Great that you've got it working! Guess that the Pi3 can pass more power to the Behringer 404 audio interface than the Pi1B+ that I have. Or maybe you have a beter power adapter for the Pi. Do you use the power adapter for the Behringer? Or do you only use the USB connection from Pi to the 404?
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Re: Pi 3, SooperLooper, and UMC-404HD audio interface

Post by Digital Larry »

Linuxmusician01 wrote:Great that you've got it working! Guess that the Pi3 can pass more power to the Behringer 404 audio interface than the Pi1B+ that I have. Or maybe you have a beter power adapter for the Pi. Do you use the power adapter for the Behringer? Or do you only use the USB connection from Pi to the 404?
I'm using the 404's power adapter. The Pi already has a backlit LCD touchscreen attached. Also it's powering my Macmillen Softstep. I'm using a 5V 2A USB supply.
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Re: Pi 3, SooperLooper, and UMC-404HD audio interface

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Setting up to compile SooperLooper on the Pi is a little bit more arduous than it was under Ubuntu Studio. wxWidgets took almost 2 hours to compile. I'm getting a bunch of errors on packages that probably have nothing to do with the GUI, so I'm going to see if I can just compile the GUI and forget about all the rest of that stuff for the moment.
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Re: Pi 3, SooperLooper, and UMC-404HD audio interface

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

Digital Larry wrote:Setting up to compile SooperLooper on the Pi is a little bit more arduous than it was under Ubuntu Studio. wxWidgets took almost 2 hours to compile. I'm getting a bunch of errors on packages that probably have nothing to do with the GUI, so I'm going to see if I can just compile the GUI and forget about all the rest of that stuff for the moment.
Is Superlooper not in the Rasbian repositories?
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Re: Pi 3, SooperLooper, and UMC-404HD audio interface

Post by Digital Larry »

Linuxmusician01 wrote: Is Superlooper not in the Rasbian repositories?
Yes it is, but my intention is to modify the UI to fit on this little LCD and to get rid of a lot of the options which I never use.
sooper-looper.JPG
sooper-looper.JPG (40.84 KiB) Viewed 9893 times
I'd also really like to try to implement a "sweeping pie" loop position indicator as found on Ableton Live and Mobius and luppp and any number of Boss pedals (though those are an LED ring, you get my drift).
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Digital Larry
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Re: Pi 3, SooperLooper, and UMC-404HD audio interface

Post by Digital Larry »

I finally got my UI mods to compile and run OK in SooperLooper. There are probably some loose ends because I commented a lot of code out, but so far so good.

A few more things about the UI I would like to change:
a) The "feedback" slider is linear. I think it would make more sense to be a logarithmic slider maybe with the bottom at -12 dB? Take a little bit of experimenting.
b) Add an "edit" button that would open the current loop (probably in Audacity unless I can get something else working).
c) Show the current session name and individual track names.
d) indicate when something is unsaved, whether track or session
e) Arc loop progress rather than linear. I don't plan on supporting the "scratch" feature so it can be a view-only control. I asked over at wxWidgets forum and there's nothing built in that does this but it doesn't sound that hard to make a custom control.
f) rearrange checkboxes and sliders which go together (e.g. Feedback/p feedb) to be located next to each other

It's getting pretty close to what I was shooting for originally, so I just need to live with it for awhile and see whether anything else needs to fall off, or if some of the things I already took off want to come back.

I'm also considering the possibility of adding the hooks for Non Session Manager into SooperLooper since I've started using NSM and Non Mixer.
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