Posted by zdw 9/13/2025
Any Raspberry Pi, even the Pico, must be orders of magnitude more powerful than that old AVR and easier to program too. A lofi groovebox made from a Pico with a few knobs and buttons attached sounds like a fun project someone probably already made.
(Still have memories of trying to find the usb port that didn't introduce noise in my usb creative thingy...)
For things like the Korg synths which use the raspberry pi, they added their own DAC's too.
Lots of synths spent their whole lives never connected to a keyboard, but might live in rack mounts and be driven by sequencers or DAWs.
A synthesizer is a device that generates (synthesizes) sound. This is done using electronic circuits. There are many many many many different ways to create sound using electronic circuits, hence the many different types of synths on the market. These days however, we see more and more synthesizers using digital circuits or even embedded software to generate sound. It has reached a point where it's possible to take the firmware of a (very expensive) "hardware" synthesizer, run it on your computer inside an emulator and get exactly the same sound out of it. Heck, some commercial synths (Korg) are these days nothing more than a box with knobs and a raspberry pi, running their commercial synth plugin software.
The "piano keyboard" in your mental model is merely the controller - the device that generates the instructions on what note the synth must play. Piano keyboards are not the only type of control mechanism available to use. For every type of instrument out there, there probably is a controller version of that instrument, e.g. https://www.akaipro.com/ewi-usb
As a musical instrument it is closest in function and mode of operation to the singing human voice and nothing at all like a piano.
Downsides: - if the software doesn’t get updated, you’re stuck running an old OS an old Mac that supports it. - you can’t just turn on the synth and use it, you need to find a cable, connect it to the Mac, launch the software, etc
(I do get that if you are very serious about making music you need a proper computer set up. I am just a mere amateur hobbyist.)
Same reason I keep my Roland Fantom around - has everything built in to the device.
Arturia have tried a few different hardware-hosts over the years, but seem to be focusing on their Astrolab platform rather than supporting iOS (Android is a non-runner due to latency).
Novation's main offerings are about analog signal paths. Back in the early 00s they had a few weird integrations like the X-Station, but its the analog nature of the bass-station and subsequent *Brute line that maintained their USP and cachet. Things like the Circuit/Launchpad are obvious AIO attempts at taking the share from similar form-factor iPad sequencing and clip launching utilities.
Do you think that making a VST is a realistic alternative to the linked instruments in the submission article? I'm guessing they're building hardware because they want something physical, it's pretty self-evident isn't it?
The precise and exact sound is less interesting, how you're able to conjure it at just the right moment and with precise controls tend to be more interesting for me personally.
So if you already have a VST, but you also have customers asking for actual hardware, why not slap your existing VST onto a Pi, and ship your "hardware" synth with this Pi inside? You end up supporting one software product across both lines.
(Only a very tiny minority of people want to record music. Music is mostly a realtime experience.)
*Based on what I read. Sadly, I don't own these devices.
That being said, the M8 workflow isn't all that bad, but it's definitely less visual than most other DAWs.
Note that using RPi is not all sunshine and roses. There were times that compute modules were extremely hard to get.