electronic practice concertina

[Don Taylor]

2 hours ago, RAc said:

btw, during my research for a compact solution, I have come across the following 

 

 

Pianobox mini II - Miditech

 

There is also a chinese clone of it called midiplus miniengine usb.

 

If this works as expected, all I would need for travel is that Gizmo and the midi tina; since the interface has a built in accu, it could even work without external power (the tina will be powered of the supply while charged).

Or you could use the Fluidsynth app on an Android* phone and load your own sondfonts.  For example Phil Taylor's concertina soundfont (see below) or you could sample your own concertina and build your own soundfont using Polyphone.

 

* I think that there is a way to use Michael Eskin's concertina sound samples on Apple devices, but I have not used an Apple device in many years.

[RAc]

2 minutes ago, Don Taylor said:

Or you could use the Fluidsynth app on an Android* phone and load your own sondfonts.  For example Phil Taylor's concertina soundfont (see below) or you could sample your own concertina and build your own soundfont using Polyphone.

 

* I think that there is a way to use Michael Eskin's concertina sound samples on Apple devices, but I have not used an Apple device in many years.

well, yes, if you have some form of computer to plug your usb midi device into, there are more software options than the time you have to look them up, that is a given. I currenly use simplepiano on a Windows surface tablet.

 

I am not saying that this device is great or better than any option, sorry for not pointing this out explicitly. If that gizmo worked, it would have a few advantages over a pc/tablet/smartphone, eg built in power supply, extreme small form factor (8*10*2 cms), but doubtlessly also disadvantages (eg not configurable sound fonts). As usual in engineering, there are always many ways to skin a cat, each with its own pros and cons. All I did was pointing out yet another way.

[RAc]

fwiw, I did now evaluate the piano box as the sound generating end for my practice concertina. It simply does not work, manufacturer support claims that the power consumption of the Arduino is too high.

 

The box is actually being developed in Taiwan and rebranded as miditech for the Western market, so apologies for writing earlier that the midiengine was a "chinese clone."

 

Next thing I will look at is a Raspberry Pi 5 running Fluidsynth. It has a similar form factor and is even a little cheaper than the Pianobox. It runs RaspianOS which is a Debian distro, so fluidsynth should not be an issue there.

[RatFace]

I may have mentioned elsewhere, but I use Audio Evolution Pro (AEP - https://www.extreamsd.com/ )running on my old phone (Pixel 3a) for my midi bando-thing:

• I have a project saved that is "ready to go", so I don't need to do any setup when I want to play
• Having said that, I do need to poke it, so it's not a fully embedded solution:
  • Turn the phone on
  • Start the app
  • Load the project
  • Arm the two tracks
• The phone is attached to the box - no wires to some external units etc. No need for an external power supply.
• The audio output (requires headphone socket!) goes back into the bando-thing, into a little 5V amp and then speakers
• This lets me use a custom soundfont (sampled bandoneon, plus also I put piano and a few other things in there)
• I also purchased the Toneboosters reverb which is pretty good
• I can use the metronome facility in AEP
• I can make use of effects, mixers, panning, multi-tracking etc
• At any time, I can just hit record and record my playing, then listen/review etc
• AEP has its own audio drivers - the latency of these is extremely low (unnoticeable)

The audio quality of this setup is (IMO) amazing - it's infinitely better than what I was getting initially with fluidsynth.

 

The cost (second hand phone + software) is about the same as the Pianobox mini ii. The functionality is greater than what that box will do.

 

The only downsides are:

• My setup can't power the phone (actually, the phone powers my bando-thing!), so I'm limited to about three hours of play time.
• I wouldn't want to be on stage and changing settings on a phone app!
• You can't embed this into an instrument and have it automatically boot up and run the app with the right project (I've wondered about suggesting this to the developer!)

Example and photos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/szQRu4fn9tfmPcSL9 In fact - this wasn't meant to be a "proper" recording - I'd been practicing a few days ago, and it's just so easy to "hit record" that I did, and afterwards thought "that's a keeper"

 

Edit: I just noticed that all the photos in that video are before I settled on this setup, which shows the phone mounted on the box:

 

 

 

 

 

Edited Wednesday at 06:16 PM by RatFace

[Don Taylor]

42 minutes ago, RatFace said:

This lets me use a custom soundfont

Can it use sf2 sound fonts?

 

43 minutes ago, RatFace said:

I'm limited to about three hours of play time.

Maybe use one of those mobile phone battery chargers to power your amp.  This one provides 27000mAh!!! 

 

I not tried this one but the one that I have will not run the microcontroller* on its own because  the microcontroller does not draw enough current and the charger shuts down because it thinks that the device it is connected to is fully charged.

 

My microcontroller is an ESP32 S3 which is considered quite a heavy user of power, I think that you are using a Teensy which is less power hungry. 

[RatFace]

6 minutes ago, Don Taylor said:

Can it use sf2 sound fonts?

 

Yes. And you can have separate sound fonts for each track too.

 

6 minutes ago, Don Taylor said:

Maybe use one of those mobile phone battery chargers to power your amp.  This one provides 27000mAh!!! 

 

The problem is that the phone's usb port is already connected to the Arduino/Teensy to (a) power it and (b) do the MIDI thing. I might be able to power the Teensy separately. Maybe it would be possible to wire things up to allow the phone to be charged separately from its usb connection to the teensy... 

 

[Don Taylor]

1 hour ago, RatFace said:

The audio output (requires headphone socket!) goes back into the bando-thing, into a little 5V amp and then speakers

I was assuming that the 5V amp was the main suck of power and that maybe you could power that from a mobile charger and just have your phone power the Teensy.

[RatFace]

17 hours ago, Don Taylor said:

I was assuming that the 5V amp was the main suck of power and that maybe you could power that from a mobile charger and just have your phone power the Teensy.

Actually, I do have a separate battery pack (4x AAA) for the audio amp. The phone just has to power the Teensy and itself. In practice, my guess is that the main drain is the audio app and the display - though actually I can turn the display off and the audio app continues to run... until it doesn't (which can take quite a while).

[Don Taylor]

2 hours ago, RatFace said:

Actually, I do have a separate battery pack (4x AAA) for the audio amp. The phone just has to power the Teensy and itself. In practice, my guess is that the main drain is the audio app and the display - though actually I can turn the display off and the audio app continues to run... until it doesn't (which can take quite a while).

It sounds like power is not a serious problem as long as you are careful about charging your phone and minimising its screen time.

 

FWIW.  There are devices on the market that allow you to charge your phone and use a USB OTG device at the same time - see the second review from a gigging musician.  I have not tried these yet but I am happy to have discovered them as a result of this thread.

 

[RatFace]

14 minutes ago, Don Taylor said:

It sounds like power is not a serious problem as long as you are careful about charging your phone and minimising its screen time.

 

FWIW.  There are devices on the market that allow you to charge your phone and use a USB OTG device at the same time - see the second review from a gigging musician.  I have not tried these yet but I am happy to have discovered them as a result of this thread.

 

 

FWIW, I got one of these to use with my newer phone (which doesn't have a headphone socket). The audio quality out is absolutely awful, and I couldn't get it to talk to the Teensy over USB at the same time as the audio (or maybe it was charging and something else?). I reckoned that trying to find one of these things that actually works (though just power + USB is probably OK) is probably more expensive than finding an old Android phone!

Edited 21 hours ago by RatFace

[Don Taylor]

2 hours ago, RatFace said:

I got one of these to use with my newer phone (which doesn't have a headphone socket). The audio quality out is absolutely awful,

Your listing does seem to say that you can put a power bank (or a charger) into one of the USB sockets (the USB-C I think) and use the USB-A socket to connect to your Teensy.

Edited 18 hours ago by Don Taylor
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