Piano Hat, Cannot get yoshimi synth to work

Support
1

I have installed yoshimi with ‘sudo apt-get install yoshimi’ on Rpi 2B.
Note that I did run an apt-get update and upgrade before, so now the kernel is 4.1 and not 3.18.
When starting yoshimi it fails because it cannot connect to the jack server.
jackd is not in yoshimi’s dependencies.
I thought yoshimi should also work directly with alsa without a jack sound server.
Does anybody have any pointers to a good ‘getting started with yoshimi’ tutorial?
I really would like to get the midi-piano example for piano hat to work.

2

You should be able to start Yoshimi from the command-line with yoshimi -a -A which will pick ALSA for input and output.

I tend to set up my config and then run it in no-gui mode like so:

yoshimi -A -a --no-gui --buffersize=1024

I’ve been trying to create a way to distribute a pre-configured Yoshimi that just needs a script to fire it up against a folder full of patches, but it’s proven easier said than done.

I have, however, managed to compile it from source to include support for Patch Change functionality ( used by the instrument key ) and I’ll redistribute that binary since being able to change instrument during play is really useful.

Also, @sandyjmacdonald managed to get Yoshimi working with Jack, and posted a brief guide here: http://sandyjmacdonald.github.io/2015/08/10/piano-hat/

3

The ‘-a -A’ did the trick. Works fine now with the piano hat and without jack.
Have you looked at the ‘-S’ (load state) option?
If you provide a default state file with instruments then it will work immediately (no need to load an instrument)

4

I´m still trying to get Pianohat working on my fully updated/upgraded Raspberry PI2 but its response to suggested: curl -sSL apt-get pimoroni.com/pianohat isn´t v.helpful such as ¨support at pimoroni.com!

5

It is not “curl -sSL apt-get pimoroni.com/pianohat”, but “curl -sSL get.pimoroni.com/pianohat”.
No apt-get, as written on the github page https://github.com/pimoroni/piano-hat.
HTH

6

I reckon the following should get everything installed and working:

## This installs everything.
sudo apt-get install python-dev libasound2-dev swig
git clone https://github.com/vishnubob/python-midi
cd python-midi && sudo python setup.py install
sudo apt-get install yoshimi
curl get.pimoroni.com/i2c | bash
sudo apt-get install python-smbus
git clone https://github.com/pimoroni/cap1xxx.git
cd cap1xxx && sudo python setup.py install
git clone https://github.com/pimoroni/Piano-HAT.git
cd Piano-HAT && sudo python setup.py install

## This gets Yoshimi and the Piano HAT midi example running.
sudo amixer cset numid=3 1
jackd -dalsa -n4 -r44100 -p512 &
yoshimi -K -a &
cd examples
sudo python midi-piano.py