Trying to create a fluidsynth-player on Raspberry Pi

[lerba]

Hello, and sorry if I'm trying to re-invent the wheel!

My dream is to build a headless sf2 player on a raspberry pi 3b with following specs:

• headless, but has a 16x2 lcd to display the name of the current soudfont
• hardware serial midi in (ttymidi)
• audio output via i2s dac
• some midi routing to change soundfont via midi program change (on a specific channel)

I've tried setting it up on Patchbox OS/ MODEP, but it didn't like ttymidi. Got it sporadically working but the whole MODEP platform seems unstable. Then I've tried to set it up manually via command line on a Raspberry Pi Lite OS, but never got audio working on fluidsynth. There seems to be some confusion whether to use ALSA or jack. Eventually the system got somehow broken and it wouldn't reboot without -f.

I've also tried to set up this Simple fluidsynth player without success.

So I've been kinda banging my head on the wall for a couple of weeks now. I was thinking maybe it makes sense to ask if anyone else has attempted something similar? What's the best suitable distro for this? Am I wasting my time with ttymidi/ uart? USB midi doesn't seem like a great solution for me, as my sequencer doesn't have usb...

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[lerba]

So I have managed to set up a stable fluidsynth-player with uart midi on my raspberry Pi. Now I'm thinking what would be the best solution to switch between sounds? Two options come to mind:

• Creating one massive soundfont with 127 presets (cycled via midi cc program change)
  or
• Create a script responding to midi on a separate channel, that cycles loaded soundfonts in fluidsynth from a file

Any thoughts?

[Audiojunkie]

The Zynthian project already has several instruments (including the fluidsynth-player) available for their users. The heart of the Zynthian is a Raspberry Pi. I'd bet you could simply download what they've got, and it would work without modification on your system.

https://zynthian.org/

On a side note, those Zynthians look really cool! As soon as Shortcircuit-XT gets released and Zynthian incorporates it into their toolset, I'm planning on getting one.

EDIT: I just had a thought.... Arch and Debian both have fluidsynth available in their repositories. I think both distros have ARM support as well.

[lerba]

Cool, thanks for your reply.

Currently I'm trying to filter out all the other midi channels but one. Does anyone here have experience with fluidynth router? I'm trying to only allow midi data from channel 8 to pass through.