zynthian-sys VS elk-pi

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.

Just found Elk Audio OS. Looks exciting, but I'm struggling to understand exactly what it is and how it might be useful. Anyone using it? https://elk.audio/

That might not matter too much for you - if not then you're set. But if it does, using small buffers is hard with Linux (and non-realtime OSes), since the kernel has other things to balance, so you can occasionally miss your deadlines and have audio glitches if the buffers are too small. These guys offer a linux distro that's been well tuned for audio processing, as well as an engine that makes it easy to drop in your effects algorithm without having to deal with hardware support and making that engine: https://elk.audio/

There's https://elk.audio/

Overall there are JUCE embedded support.

If you need more bare bones there are some DSP only resources. Not sure if I saw there the RtAudio which is also very minimal -

I’ve run JUCE apps on embedded linux, a Raspberry Pi running maybe Elk Audio or Patchbox OS might be a good bet