REAPER on the Banana Pi

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danboid
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REAPER on the Banana Pi

Post by danboid »

I posted the following to the REAPER forum's 'Linux NATIVE' thread a couple of weeks ago but I thought it might interest some people on this forum who don't visit the REAPER forums (very often). Besides, this sub-forum is hardly bursting with posts! :)
I never thought I'd be able to run REAPER on my Banana Pi but last night thats just what happened. I've only given it the most basic of testing so far but I'm impressed at how well it runs on such cheap, low-end hardware. REAPER loads quickly and the interface is responsive - there's not much difference in those aspects to running it on my i7 laptop but of course there is a big difference in what the two are capable of doing. It's nice to see that REAPER on very low cost ARM hardware is usable for basic tracking workloads at least.

I installed the armbian desktop version of Debian Jessie onto my 2TB Samsung SATA HD, which uses the sunxi Linux 3.4.112 kernel and the XFCE desktop. I attached a Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 to my BPi and set JACK(2) to a buffer size of 1024 @ 48Khz and with these settings I was able to record 10 audio tracks (without using any FX) before I started to see xruns creep in.

It will be interesting to see if using a more recent mainline kernel (4.X) allows for the recording and playback of any more tracks. It'd also be interesting to hear how REAPER runs on something like the ODROID XU4 when running off a USB3 HD or SSD or if anyone is lucky enough to have an ARM machine with SATA3 that they could try REAPER on? I think SATA3 is solely the domain of the pricey AARCH 64 bit server boards right now though.
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