03-18-2021, 04:38 PM | #1 |
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Raspberry Pi 4, 8gb
Basically, a massive upgrade for my Behringer mixer. Its got an audio interface mode but its latency isnt great.
However, I can now attach a screen to the mixer, a tiny raspberry pi, and happily record straight into Reaper. The mixer now has a tiny pc attached to the side of it, handling all its audio, and giving me a DAW too All monitoring done straight thru the mixer anyway, so latency is less of an issue in some regards. 40 tracks in Reaper at the moment, 39 playing back time stretched. 1 track recording, latency is 21ms. Not great but this all stock settings on the Pi and in Reaper, straight out the box. Now to overclock the Pi... EDIT: Thats is in no way how I'm going to be using it - 40 tracks, but its amazing this 'works'. Certainly means I can do a few passes on the mixer with all tracks recording, and have direct control over the mixer. Latency can be much much lower if I'm not using everything stupidly like the above Last edited by maxdembo; 03-18-2021 at 04:50 PM. |
03-18-2021, 07:26 PM | #2 |
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Nice. Running raspbian, or what?
Is the Pi doing ADC through some add-on, or you're plugging the Behringer in via USB? What about the issue of dropouts and such -- any problems? Only one track at a time? Is that the limitation of the Behringer or the limit in terms of writing to the micro SD? What screen did you use? |
03-18-2021, 07:45 PM | #3 |
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I'm also using Raspbian on Pi 4b.
I tweak system audio using scirpt. https://github.com/dynobot/Linux-Audio-Adjustments But my Pi 4b still get more latency than my laptop Archlinux. I test that in same Audio Card, same track number, same FX(build in reaper). I can't get a lower latency even Pi 4b cpu in low usage(or Xrun come out). Why that happened? |
03-18-2021, 09:30 PM | #4 |
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Raspbian.
CPU overclocked to 2.3ghz. GPU clocked to 900. Overvolt set to 12. 52Pi cooler. One silent 140mm fan Recording 16 channels of 48khz, 24bit, mono, 42ms latency, but can zero latency mixer monitor, or I can press a button on the mixer and monitor the delayed return from Reaper. Recording from Reaper to a USB 3 HDD. The mixer runs in standalone mode, recording to a hard drive, 16 channels, or as an audio interface, via USB 2. I have it set to audio interface mode recording out from Reaper to a portable USB 3 HDD, 2TB. EDIT: When changing latency, I have to restart the mixer to get everything working again, but thats not a big deal. Reaper itself doesnt crash. EDIT 2: Just an old monitor I had spare. Last edited by maxdembo; 03-18-2021 at 09:37 PM. |
03-18-2021, 09:46 PM | #5 |
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Hey given the circumstances 42ms for 16 channels 24/48 seems like a very respectable result, and if you're just tracking then who cares anyway. :-)
How many USB ports does the Pi have these days? Do you have to use a hub or something to connect everything? Oh OK -- I thought we were talking about this kind of thing. I was imagining a tiny little field recorder kind of setup. |
03-18-2021, 10:06 PM | #6 | |
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Pi has 2xUSB 3, 2xUSB 2, but apparently can only really power 1 external drive. Mouse/keyboard/drive, so one USB port for a hub. I have the Retrokits RK006 which is super low power draw, so my little Pi 4 is going to get 10 midi outs too. |
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03-18-2021, 10:36 PM | #7 | |
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03-19-2021, 04:04 AM | #8 |
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Due to the bus structure of the Pi, it's a bit less performant than a full-blown PC.
With the Pi4, a lot of these shortcomings have been corrected. Like the ethernet port no longer running over USB. I haven't bought a Pi4 yet, but the previous incarnations laft a bit to be desired when it came to ethernet and USB performance. That's why you won't find many doing low-latency audio on the Pi forum. That should take off with the Pi4, tho. At least in my mind and especially since it comes with 4 and even 8 GB of ram. And PCIe internally.
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03-19-2021, 06:18 AM | #9 |
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8 hours recording on the mixer, on the Pi4, overclocked, into reaper, 16 channels, 42ms latency, rock solid stable.
Passive cooling. Gonna try the same today with the Zoom H5. |
03-19-2021, 07:27 AM | #10 |
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I think at this point, everything is fast enough to have it being the audio interface at fault here.
My mixer is made for recording only. Not 16 channel playback/monitor via a PC and recording at the same time. You can bet on it that Behringer used this notion to scrimp and save on the interface part of the mixer My Zoom H5 is working absolutely fine as an audio interface with 4 channel monitoring while recording straight into the Pi 4 (its even using the Zoom internal speaker for playback, which I didnt even know the Zoom had tbh ). 5.3ms latency. Thats with USB powering the Zoom too. Might function better if the Zoom was battery powered, one less thing for the Pi to do. EDIT: CPU temp is never going over 56 degrees C passively cooled. With the fan turned on, chip stays at a lovely 27 degrees. Last edited by maxdembo; 03-19-2021 at 07:59 AM. |
03-19-2021, 08:37 AM | #11 |
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Pretty amazing what can be had in such a small package now of days.
Have a Rasberrypi4 4gig with a hifiberry dac+ adc pro, same here lowest I can go is 128 samples with 5.3ms delay. Either I'm getting old or am used to a little latency? the 5.3ms does not bother me when playing piano's through linux sampler, playing surge or dexed in Reaper. Goodness, this little box kills some of the machines I was using ten-fifteen years ago. BTW Maxdembo from the looks of that picture you could use a shave :-) |
03-19-2021, 08:41 AM | #12 |
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"CPU overclocked to 2.3ghz. GPU clocked to 900. Overvolt set to 12"
Wow that's pushing it pretty hard, been running mine at 2.1ghz, GPU 700 and overvolt at 6. Is heat a problem? mine runs pretty consistent at around 60C when playing live. |
03-19-2021, 09:12 AM | #13 | |
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https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews...oler,6259.html |
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03-19-2021, 09:27 AM | #14 |
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I hooked my 4GB Raspberry Pi back up to my Behringer UMC1820 to do some more testing. I only ever recorded four track acoustic drums to a jam that had been done on my main DAW.
Anyway, I put the drums from that into a new project and recorded two tracks of guitar, and a track of bass with the drums from the other jam. The minimum I could set REAPER for was 256 samples, which got me 5.8/11ms on REAPER's display. I'm overclocked at voltage=2 and freq=1750. I plugged the bass and rhythm guitars straight into the Behringer UMC1820, but for the cheezy solo track I plugged into my new little "FLAMMA" practice amp, and used the headphone out to the UMC1820 for a better lead sounding tone. Anyway, this sloppy jam was all monitored through REAPER and multi-tracked on the 4GB Raspberry Pi. https://www.soundclick.com/music/son...ongID=14216922 This is a screen shot of some performance stuff as it was playing back. |
03-19-2021, 09:39 AM | #15 | |
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What amazing little beast this thing is. For the record, I'm using these overclock settings... current_limit_override=1 force_turbo=1 over_voltage=12 arm_freq=2300 gpu_freq=900 |
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03-19-2021, 09:55 AM | #16 | |
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I'm totally impressed with them, and use them like they are normal full sized computers virtually every day.
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With the aluminum heatsink case I have on the Pi4 it was getting pretty warm after recording for an hour. I don't think I could push mine to 2.3Ghz without getting a cooler like yours. Towards the end of my testing today, I think the Pi was starting to get heat stressed because on a few of the very last takes I'd hit record and it would hesitate before starting to roll. |
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03-19-2021, 10:11 AM | #17 |
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5,3 msec is respectable. Lots of interfaces don't get there on Mac or Windows.
Do you guys feel like overclocking makes it better?
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03-19-2021, 10:29 AM | #18 | |
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It starts to throttle CPU/GPU within about 8 mins apparently on a case like yours, depending on factors, obviously. Getting any airflow towards the case would probably help, I suspect any old fan running near that case would make a difference. I've taken the tiny 40mm fan off the 52Pi heat sink (its horrible, I thought we'd moved on from these tiny vile noisey fans, this takes me right back to my days overclocking/cooling the Southbridge on an old AMD machine) and just have a 140mm silent case fan just sitting next to the Pi until I get a case for the whole thing. Its making a HUGE difference. I suspect just cooling airflow near your case would help, if the case/heatsink is touching the CPU. I also used thermal paste and not the little thermal sticky pads that came with the heatsink. MASSIVELY YES. Stock is 1.5ghz CPU, I'm on 2.3ghz. Major difference there. Plus the GPU stock is 500mhz (I think), mine is on 900mhz, nearly double. Pi 4 out the box struggles with 1080p youtube so much so thats its kinda unwatchable. With the overclock, 720 is perfect, and 1080p it will cope totally fine with, perfect playback once YouTube loads it properly (Pi 4 seems to struggle loading the 1080p page, but if I start the video at a lower resolution, then switch to 1080p, its fine). It still hates any 60fps content tho. And this is all fine by me as I dont want to use YouTube on this machine, but it shows how much difference the overclock has made. |
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03-19-2021, 10:38 AM | #19 | |
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Once I overclocked it, I was able to set a 256 block size, and reliably record while monitoring through REAPER at the same time as playing back other tracks, and every track including the one recording, had multiple FX on them. |
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03-19-2021, 11:18 AM | #20 | |||
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I have no idea. Unfortunately I'm in the middle of moving everything out of my studio to get new flooring put in, and I already stashed the Pi away in another room.
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Both my Pi3 and Pi4 became MythTV clients running Kodi, replacing two ageing full size Windows 7 computers in house. I'm thinking about buying another one for experimenting, which was what I originally bought the first two for. Quote:
I'm probably going to eventually get an 8GB Pi4 that I can use more for playing around, and I would likely go with an active cooler and higher overclocking. When I recorded the drums on that jam project a year ago I was only overclocked to something like 1Ghz, but that was NOT monitoring through REAPER. All the tracks I recorded today were monitoring through REAPER with multiple FX, so I pushed the OC higher than my previous test. Quote:
They can stream over WiFi, but it's not as smooth and needs a lot of pre-buffering before video starts playing. |
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03-19-2021, 11:30 AM | #21 | |
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Next, I'll be seeing if I can get the lightest distro possible and see if that helps. Just dedicate the Pi 4 to being offline, and Reaper. Nothing else. |
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03-19-2021, 11:46 AM | #22 | ||
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03-19-2021, 12:26 PM | #23 |
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Be interesting to see how far I can push it with plug ins, amount of instances of plug ins.
VCV Rack to try next... |
03-19-2021, 12:45 PM | #24 |
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03-19-2021, 03:37 PM | #25 |
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Hmm, apparently this processor is fine up to 2.5ghz. Not sure the Pi itself is tho.
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03-20-2021, 01:30 AM | #26 |
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Thanks for the overclocking report, guys.
I'm not worried about YT. Or even latency, is I don't need processing VSTs while recording, or monitoring, but it's interesting to hear about OC results. Damn, now I need to get an RPi4 :-)
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03-20-2021, 09:07 PM | #27 | |
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I dont think any previous versions would impress me much, but this Pi4 8gb version is pretty sweet. The overclock feels noticeable just using the system. Very similar to how I've felt desktops get snappier when I've overclocked those. I'd buy another one immediately, if I had the use for it, and overclock it again for sure |
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03-24-2021, 10:25 AM | #28 |
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I disabled the onboard and HDMI audio in the boot config.txt...
Seems to have made things a little more stable, a little snappier, again. I'll do some more low latency tests with the Zoom H5 later to see if there is any difference. |
03-24-2021, 10:43 AM | #29 |
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Heatsink
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03-24-2021, 10:44 AM | #30 |
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Whoah. Might be hard to get through an airport with that thing. :-)
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03-24-2021, 11:40 AM | #31 | |
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Still, that case/heatsink, plus this stand with a silent slow moving 120mm fan, should be quite amazing. https://www.seeedstudio.com/Rack-Tower-p-4675.html Silent and never getting any where near throttling temps. Nice for an overclock, and great for taking on the road. Getting rid of that LED lighting crap is the first mod I'll do tho |
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03-24-2021, 08:35 PM | #32 |
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I just got a 8g rpi4 (on 64bit rasberian), and I'm having problem executing it.
No response is given when executing from installed file, when I tried to run reaper from install-reaper.sh, it says: error while loading shared libraries: libasound.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory I used reaper to record and live playback fine with a 4g rpi4, so I'm not sure if it's reaper's problem, the 64bit system, or me forgetting to install essential dependencies. |
03-24-2021, 08:40 PM | #33 |
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Is it possible that you downloaded the 32 bit version of REAPER?
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03-24-2021, 08:48 PM | #34 |
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I made this kinda mistake initially. Tried installing the linux version instead of the armv71 version
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03-24-2021, 08:48 PM | #35 |
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03-24-2021, 08:49 PM | #36 |
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well now im confused
which ever the second one i installed was, works EDIT: Just checked, armv71 is the one I'm using. Am I using the wrong version? Last edited by maxdembo; 03-24-2021 at 09:01 PM. |
03-24-2021, 09:05 PM | #37 |
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My understanding was that the latest Pi's were on aarch64 aka armv8... maybe you have a slightly older Pi? Or maybe ARM is backwards compatible that way? I don't know much about it...
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03-24-2021, 09:20 PM | #38 | |
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The 64bit system I installed was from https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspios_arm64/images/ It's still beta, so not really recommended. Although people have been saying that it's quite stable. The benefit of 64bit system is that a single program can use the entire 8g ram, rather than only 4g. |
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03-24-2021, 09:36 PM | #39 |
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The 4GB limit also applied to 32 bit Windows. It's the max addresses to memory that a 32 bit OS can see.
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03-24-2021, 09:44 PM | #40 | |
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Well, I just tried the aarch64 version. Reaper doesnt load. Armv71, Reaper works fine. Pi 4b, 8gb, def 64bit. I wonder if I have the wrong OS installed. I thought I had the latest Pi OS, which is 64bit. Intriguing... |
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