Koodihommia

I describe how I build the Zynthian Raspberry Pi OS synthesizer from a kit in a previous blog post . It sits mostly idle connected to my sound card, so I decided to make it a bit more useful while it is idling. The first goal was to make it play Radio Helsinki, one of my most played online radio stations. That's simple enough; I just created a systemd service which connects to the stream using mplayer. Note that I'm using jackaudio as an audio "sink." The synthesizer is thus perfectly playable, even if I am listening to something else meanwhile. I get soon bored listening to only one channel. The next step is then to add Spotify. There is a pre-made debian package called raspotify , but alas, the bundled librespot Spotify client does not work with the jackaudio backend. I decided that the most comfortable choice is to compile librespot in the Raspberry Pi and then create a systemd service (after all, that is pretty much all raspotify does). The Spotify client service...

I stumbled upon the Zynthian  open source synthesizer platform project some months ago and found myself visiting the site even more often than hacker news. Eventually, I ended up buying a Zynthian build kit and did not suffer buyer's remorse since I was looking for a new hobby project anyways which would not be at least entirely coding. Zynthian is in a nutshell, an open source synthesizer platform. It comes bundled with a set of open source Linux synths, effects, and other audio software. The kit I ordered contains a Raspberry Pi, an RPI sound-card, touchscreen, some audio ports, and encoders. All this is connected via a purpose-built printed circuit board. I was a bit rusty on my soldering skills so while waiting for the parts to arrive, I practiced a bit on some old hardware salvaged from my parent's farm. I just merely desoldered and soldered components as a way to practice The actual building was relatively easy, mostly because of the fantastic instructions provided ...