I’ve come to the conclusion that without a USB soundcard, using either the C.H.I.P. or the RPI2 for a synth attachment to a MIDI controller is not viable. However, a few cool synths for UNIX systems exist that you can probably run on one of these babies with little effort.
I’ve managed to control and sound off using fluidsynth (instructions at
http://andrewdotni.ch/blog/2015/02/28/midi-synth-with-raspberry-p/
by Andrew, thanks!).
However, there’s still lots of noise coming through. Not sure if this is the latent energy use by the RPI2 or what, but I’ll work it out eventually. Likely I need to invest in a USB soundcard to really go anywhere with this.
Potentially a MIDI controlled soundbank or synth box might be the end goal anyway. I don’t know how viable it’ll be to have the RPI running like this for something like a live show, but I’ve seen people do it. My intent is to get yoshimi running with full MIDI control:
https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/yoshimi
I’ll keep y’all updated as it goes. Here’s a picture of a C.H.I.P.
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