Piano Booster Ubuntu Karmic Live CD/USB

[CarlM]

Hi Louis,

just tested my first Piano Booster Ubuntu Karmic Live CD/USB. I managed it with the Ubuntu Customization Kit (http://uck.sourceforge.net/) and used ubuntu-destop iso as base. The results on my netbook are very good but next time I will try xubuntu to get out more performance and less system load.

Carl

[Louis B.]

Hi Carl,

Thanks for that, this could help windows users try out a system with a
low latency midi sound generator. (Although I have done some work
integrating PB with fluidsynth on windows) PB seems to work better now
on Linux than on windows, there is less tearing and flickering. Have you
included fluidsynth or Timidity? What about auto starting fluidsynth
automatically on boot up? Is there a link that I can try this out?

I don't expect that changing to XFE from Gnome to make much difference,
both systems should (hopefully) use zero CPU when idle. Adding a
realtime kernel from Ubuntu studio would be interesting though.

Louis

On Mon, 2010-02-15 at 11:15 -0800, CarlM [via Piano Booster] wrote:
> Hi Louis,
>
> just tested my first Piano Booster Ubuntu Karmic Live CD/USB. I
> managed it with the Ubuntu Customization Kit
> (http://uck.sourceforge.net/) and used ubuntu-destop iso as base. The
> results on my netbook are very good but next time I will try xubuntu
> to get out more performance and less system load.
>
> Carl

[jesselks]

As it appears that the UbuntuStudio crowd doesn't (currently) want to make a liveDVD/USB version, Carl's uck approach looks perfect for baking our most useful changes into a new custom Ubuntu-based iso image.

I've heard of a few other projects based on other linux distros:
Fedora - http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/
Debian - http://64Studio.com
ubuntu - http://puredyne.goto10.org/
OpenSuse - http://jacklab.net/jacklaborg/english/ 
? - http://dynebolic.org/

To test out Piano Booster on Ubuntu 10.04 I've been using a bootable usb flash stick with the Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop iso image(create-liveusb.sh). Then after boot, I make volatile customizations with a short script(pianobooster-liveusb-script-u10.04.sh) such as adding a PPA repository, installing piano booster, downloading Midi files to play, setting ABC editing with ABC2Midi conversion, setting up a build environment(pb-build.sh), etc.  I'm having trouble editing the wiki, but I'll post these plus instructions there if folks find this approach useful.

It works well enough for me on my desktop PC for practicing the few songs I am working on. Later this week I plan to test out on a netbook (eee 700; if it can work there....).

After that I'll try out adding the ubuntu real-time kernel. Although, since all sound output is through my midi keyboard (haven't yet tried fluidsynth or timitidy), I've not experienced latency issues. So I may need help in evaluating how successful a rt-kernel liveusb is working.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

[jesselks]

An update on trying PianoBooster (PB) with a Real Time (RT) kernel:

Tried out PureDyne CD version 911 (the most promising real-time kernel based live CD distro) with Piano booster and fluidsynth with a couple settings from my multiboot liveusb on an Athlon 64x2(~2GHz).

First, I unpacked the puredyne iso's "live" folder to the first partition and added a grub4dos menu entry (menu.lst):
  title Start puredyne-911-CD-i386 from partition 0
  map --unmap=0:0xff
  map --unhook
  root (hd0,0)
  kernel /live/vmlinuz ramdisk_size=1000000 boot=live persistent file=/live/pure.seed quickreboot username=lintian hostname=puredyne union=aufs
  initrd /live/initrd.img

Second, I booted and ran my stock PB config:
$ pianobooster-liveusb-script-u10.10.sh
$ pb-fluidsynth.sh
$ pianobooster
 # Set MIDI Input (MIDI:0 - keyboard) and output (Fluidsynth:0)

With fluidsynth settings "-c 6 -z 128" is sounded okay. With "-c 2 -z 128" I heard static. And with "-c 12 -z 1024" (as expected) I heard latency. These are basically the same results as a non-Real-Time kernel (i.e. stock Ubuntu). So the real test of a RT kernel will be on a computer that experienced latency.

Couldn't run this on my netbook (eee 700) because installing fluidsynth (and the 100MB+ sound font files) sucked up all the RAM.

I will try this out again (and on my eee 700) after I've made a custom RT/PB live iso with UCK as suggested earlier.

[jesselks]

Finally got UCK to work. I built a custom LiveCD Iso with Pianobooster, fluidsynth, the demo PB midi file zip, and a real time kernel. I also added sheet music editing (ABS2MIDI/PS) and the build tools need to build PB from source.

Not sure all of what was necessary, but I used a fresh install of ubuntu 10.04 to build a u10.04 based iso using UCK flow (v0.4.4-1) and UCK version 2.2.1 (downloaded debs from sourceforge site... after installing uck v2.0.12 from repo).

I had been trying to build on a mounted directory (necessary for eventually building from a liveUSB) and it was failing. However, I might have figured out what I was doing wrong and can try again later. Also, I found out that u10.10 will not get a RealTime kernel. Starting in 11.04 there will be "-lowlatency" and "-preempt".

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to isolate "latency" on any system without using unusual fluidsynth configuration. So anyone out there who's experienced it want to give it a try? I'm okay with a download from my server, but it's very slow (<30KB/s for a 700MB file). I'll test this out on my netbook next.

I'd like to share this work with others, but I'm not sure what's best the way. In the absence of the insight from others, I'll likely follow this path:
  Get UCK to run on a LiveUSB using a mounted directory.
  Auto-start Fuildsynth & Pianobooster upon boot,
  Pre-configure PB to use fluidsynth and load a midi file (scrb. fair anyone?)
  Post instructions/scrips to the wiki

Jesse

[Louis B.]

Hi Jesse + Carl

Sorry for the delay in replying I have had horrendous computer issues, 3 hard disk failures plus a serious virus infection on old PC that we were using as a spare which had an old version of Fire-fox that did not auto update with the needed security patches.

I really do want to look at this but a have to write some minutes of a meeting that I should have done ages ago.

Perhaps you can put a link up (or email me if you prefer) of your image for me to down load.

I am quite happy to put any publicly that you want for this on the PB site. I will reply in detail to this later thanks for your patience.

Louis

[jesselks]

Nothing good to report on running u10.04-rt on my asus eee 700. On the bright side, PB runs. However fluidsynth generates garbage after a half dozen notes are played. It may be related to RAM as it's all used up by the time everything is started. It also took 4 minutes to boot and 2 minutes to start PB & Fluidsynth.

Tried it out PB briefly on a friend's eee900 (which has twice the ram, 1GB), but didn't get a chance to test fluidsynth.

Looks like my netbook will have to use output to USB:midi-out (keyboard) for synthesizing notes.

Anyone have any ideas for lightening up resource usage on u10.04 or getting fluidsynth to run on low power machines? If so, I can test them out. Otherwise, I'll probably spend time on PB for more mainstream hardware.

[jesselks]

Been unsuccessful in getting UCK to build a PB-ubuntu.iso from within a liveCD (so that we can more easily share build configurations). Put in a question to the UCK folks, but no reply so far. Until that works, I have put together instructions on using UCK to build PB (including configuration scripts). If people find it helpful, I'll add it to the wiki.  See www.jlks.net/p/uck-liveusb/

In summary:
Install ubuntu 10.04 i386 Desktop

sudo apt-get --yes install uck
wget https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/uck/2.4.3-0ubuntu1/+buildjob/2132646/+files/uck_2.4.3-0ubuntu1_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i uck_2.4.3-0ubuntu1_all.deb


If your home directory doesn't have 5GB of free space, mount another drive:
sudo mount -o dev,suid,exec /dev/disk/by-label/$1 /mnt/tmp
ln -s /mnt/tmp/uck-tmpdir ~/tmp


Copy configuration:
# download BoosterMusicFiles to ~/tmp/customization-scripts/BoosterMusicBooks/
$ touch ~/tmp/customization-scripts/customize_iso
$ gedit  ~/tmp/customization-scripts/customize
add-apt-repository ppa:racb/extra
cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.orig
cat <<EOF >> /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid universe
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-updates universe
EOF
apt-get update
apt-get --yes --auto-remove remove openoffice.org-core
apt-get --yes install libqt4-opengl libqt4-xml
apt-get --yes install pianobooster


Then start UCK:
sudo uck-remaster /path/to/ubuntu-10.04-desktop-i386.iso