zynthian-sys VS pianojacq

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.

As someone who does this too: it depends. If you take time out every now and then to completely refactor your code base it can actually be surprisingly effective. I've done exactly that on my last project and I'm pretty happy with the end result, you can have a look for yourself:

https://gitlab.com/jmattheij/pianojacq/-/tree/master/js

This project will likely never be finished, there are always nice new things to add or requests from people, there is no commercial pressure because it is a hobby project and I don't have a boss to answer to. And even if such refactoring operations take me two weeks or more (this one I did while I was mostly just working on a laptop without access to a keyboard so it was sometimes tricky to ensure that nothing broke) in the end it is worth it to me because I am also paying the price for maintaining the code and if it is messy then I would stop working on it.

The project moves forward in fits and starts, sometimes I work on it for weeks on end and sometimes it is dormant for months. In a commercial setting or in a much larger team I don't think this approach would work.

Two things:

- adding interactivity to a web page vs building an application. Those are not the same thing, and what you read applies to the first

- there's a widely accepted belief that vanilla js is not suitable to build apps. I don't buy in this belief. I have a built networked Scrabble game written in vanilla js. Both the backend and the frontend. This simplicity allowed external contributors not well versed in the modern web stack to contribute. I also was able to enter the code of Pianojacq (from jaquesm) [1] and contribute quite easily because he also chose vanilla js. This simplicity is very valuable, and lost with modern framework, and nobody is really concerned about this.

I've done some React development, so I know my way in a modern app. I've also contributed to a frontend written in Vue. I think they solve problems but bring complexity to the table, in particular the tooling (bundlers, minifiers, etc), the dependencies and the debugging being much harder.

It seems DOM manipulation through native browser API scares many people, but when it's what you are familiar with, your usual "framework", it's manageable. You need to be disciplined to avoid things getting messy (a discipline frameworks partially enforce), but I really believe you can go far with vanilla js.

I believe React & Co are often picked to ease beginners' contribution, but they actually do require expertise. I'd rather touch vanilla js code from a beginner or an experienced developer than a React code from a beginner.

It's a matter of taste. Vanilla JS has the taste of fresh air to me. It's zen. You write the code and it runs. No tools, no slow compilation, no minification that complexifies the debugging. Minification which is only useful because with those framework you bundle an awful quantity of code in the first place. Yes, source maps exists but they don't do everything.

But today you won't have access to the whole ecosystem of existing React components with vanilla JS. It might be a curse or a benediction.

[1] https://gitlab.com/jmattheij/pianojacq

As for 1) yes, I can do that, the reason it is set where it is right now is because very soft keypresses on real pianos with sensorbars installed are typically fingers brushing keys on the way to other keys and these false triggers leave a lot of errors that aren't really errors. I'll make that setting configurable.

2) yes, if you look in the 'midi' directory on the gitlab site ( https://gitlab.com/jmattheij/pianojacq/-/tree/master/midi , but also linked from the application) there are whole bunch of them that all should work well