zynthian-sys VS apulse

There's a bunch of people doing some pretty amazing synth builds with the Raspberry Pi -- the Zynthian crew [0] springs to mind.

Basically bring your own USB midi keyboard / controller - these tend to be cheap, but also engender very strong opinions, so there's some distinct advantages to having them as separate components, but with the synth box being much more portable than a laptop or desktop.

As to the Korg Wavestate - on this side of the pond (AU) it has an RRP of A$1500, though street pricing is around A$1000.

[0] https://zynthian.org/

Another option might be to get a Raspberry Pi and a USB audio interface to run Zynthian. Zynthian can be built from scratch with a TV, mouse and keyboard. You will need the USB audio for a line input from your amp. Heaps of DIY learning building your own Zynthian. You can scale up to the full hardware kit if you like what you see.

I suggest something Raspberry Pi based, Zynthian for example. It's the total opposite in this regard, allowing so much freedom and possibilities that it can get overwhelming.

There are several great RPi synth projects around, including mt32-pi, mini-dexed and samplerbox, but they're all intended for headless use (or with a tiny embedded display). The outlier in that respect AFAIK is Zynthian: https://zynthian.org/

Exactly opposite situation in my case - my Ubuntu Studio rig has been rock solid for tracking and many projects .. but the good news is that even if, for whatever reason, you can't qite grok things to be as productive as a pro Ubuntu Studio user (hint: you can) we have all the good things happening in ZynthianOS to explore, anyway - and this just wraps up the same essential goodies into a hardware device that is push-button-user friendly:

http://zynthian.org

And of course there are bleeding edge lessons learned, applied in things like monome, etc.

Zynthian is a good option but a bit hard to get your hands on in the silicon supply chain crisis.

Zynthian is a good one to add to this list.

You might get some more traction by integrating a Raspberry Pi in a eurorack adapter (or RPi Pico) with some sort of CV interface and leveraging an open source project like Zynthian.

Most of my audio comes from Firefox, Steam, and other random miscellaneous programs. I'm wondering if I can rely on apulse for this? If I need to do some configuration that's more than okay, but if it's super buggy or hardly works then it's not worth the trouble. If anyone has experience with apulse I would love to hear more about it.

I read this and my first thought is "oh shit, is Firefox about to stop working?"

some of us like our software to be stable and reliable, and not switch to the newest bullshit just because they can. I'm still bitter about being forced to find a workaround for FF requiring pulseaudio. Am I now gonna need to find a workaround for this? I run FF 94 right now, and will upgrade with trepidation...

(shoutout to https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse. THANKS.)

Rather than re-compile firefox, maybe take a look at https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse which provide a shim to eliminate pulse.

Firefox does use PulseAudio for output. I don't run an ALSA-only setup, but I believe you can use apulse to emulate PA over ALSA for specific applications like so: apulse firefox

When launching the binary set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to include the oldlibs directory, e.g. LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/badsector/oldlibs. Some very old games may also need older versions of C++ library, you can find those in some older distros' "compat" packages, e.g. this one from SuSE 9.1 will contain most files you'll need - do not install the package, just extract the needed files. A few games may need convincing to use these files, use LD_PRELOAD for that. In addition some games may use OSS instead of ALSA so you'll need a wrapper. An OSS-to-PulseAudio wrapper is often available and you can preload it either with padsp (which will only work with the native version though, so no 32bit apps in 64bit linux) or doing it manually with LD_PRELOAD (which is basically what padsp does). There should be OSS support module for plain ALSA too if you do not have/want PulseAudio (or you can extract the relevant libraries from the padsp and use them with apulse).

apulse?

I think there are a lot more than your two solutions, for example there is apulse to run pulseaudio applications on top of ALSA. Of course your bluetooth headset will probably not work well with that, you'd still need another daemon like pulseaudio or pipewire to get good results there.

I don't think that's important. In practice you can also use the pulseaudio API and that will work everywhere because of this: https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse

This has been a life saver for me on GNU/Linux https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse