Software

Pisound is compatible with virtually all Linux distributions and software as it comes with an ALSA audio and MIDI driver integrated into mainline Raspbian Linux kernel (ver. 4.4.27+). The support driver for Pisound consists of two pieces - the Linux kernel module and user-space pisound-btn daemon.

The Pisound button daemon is a user space program which implements monitoring of The Button on the board by registering a GPIO interrupt handler. Therefore it takes minimal CPU resources, but is still able to react to button pushes just at the moment it was interacted with. Read more on The Button functionality below.

You can find the source code for The Button here and kernel module here.

Patchbox OS

For quickest setup, targeted at audio applications, we recommend using the SD card image of our Patchbox OS.

Installing The Pisound Software

To install the Pisound software on Debian compatible distributions like Raspbian, run the below command in a terminal. It can also be used for updating the software:

curl https://blokas.io/pisound/install.sh | sh

This will set up the Blokas APT server and install all the software packages for Pisound. Then you may run pisound-config to further customize your installation:

sudo pisound-config

Verifying It Works

Once the system boots up, run a terminal and run:

 amidi -l
 arecord -l
 aplay -l

You should see output similar to:

 pi@raspberrypi:~ $ amidi -l
 Dir Device    Name
 IO  hw:1,0    pisound MIDI PS-10JAD4Q
 pi@raspberrypi:~ $ arecord -l
 **** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
 card 1: pisound [pisound], device 0: PS-10JAD4Q snd-soc-dummy-dai-0 []
   Subdevices: 1/1
   Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
 pi@raspberrypi:~ $ aplay -l
 **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
 card 0: ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA], device 0: bcm2835 ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA]
   Subdevices: 8/8
   Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
   Subdevice #1: subdevice #1
   Subdevice #2: subdevice #2
   Subdevice #3: subdevice #3
   Subdevice #4: subdevice #4
   Subdevice #5: subdevice #5
   Subdevice #6: subdevice #6
   Subdevice #7: subdevice #7
 card 0: ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA], device 1: bcm2835 ALSA [bcm2835 IEC958/HDMI]
   Subdevices: 1/1
   Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
 card 1: pisound [pisound], device 0: PS-10JAD4Q snd-soc-dummy-dai-0 []
   Subdevices: 1/1
   Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Feedback

In case you're having difficulties with getting Pisound to run, contact us and the community here, provide the exact error and the last command you've executed.

Compatible OSes

Please add or let us know if you have Pisound working on a distribution that is not on the list yet!

Comments & Questions

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