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Comment by temporal_123 | Hacker News Reader

I did something similar for emulating Pipe Organs: openpipes.org

How does that compare with just running Aeolus[0] on an RPi ?

[0] https://kokkinizita.linuxaudio.org/linuxaudio/aeolus/

My first prototypes were done with Aeolus, which is a simple but limited additive synth with up to 64 components. This distro utilizes GrandOrgue, a very specialized Pipe Organ emulator and sampler, running headless on a framebuffer and loading a number of postprocessing plugins if necessary. It Is capable of not only sounding hyper realistic but also running very complex register combinations via midi, with 24/96 multi-attack multi-release samples. Raspi4 Is the first generation able to run the hundreds of simultaneous streams needed for this task.

I agree that my project runs on the application layer, not as impressive as this bare metal solution.

I suspect that Fons might disagree with your assessment of Aeolus, but fair enough. Thanks for the info.

I've had correspondence with Fons, including a little drama about somebody improving upon his code, which he disagreed, and caused the deletion of the improved repo. This incident put me further away from working with its codebase, in fear of further retaliation from His part. If you have further interest in modelling, Modartt also has a modelled Pipe Organ now apart from Pianoteq. In the future I plan to work on GAN-based Pipe modelling, to obtain a whole new experimentation domain regarding Pipe voicing.

For Pipe Organ professionals, sounding similar Is just one aspect of the instrument. There are tonnes of other nuances, that require as much thought as the sound emulation itself. In that vein Is that I call Aeolus "simple". The sound is pretty accurate, but most pro players I know pass from it for sample based-complex operation emulated apps like GO or Hauptwerk.

BTW, I run Pianoteq on a custom-built RPi4. No samples, full physical modelling synthesis. It can handle it with ease.

I recently visited the pipe organ museum in Valley (Bavaria, Germany), where they did something similar: connect an organ console (which had been replaced with a newer one) to a PC to recreate the original sound of the organ (http://www.lampl-orgelzentrum.com/St.Lorenz_Zentralspieltisc...) - however this was done using samples. While reading that, I wondered if it would be possible to get the same (or maybe an even better) result by emulating the pipes...

Both are done, each with good results. There is a whole community making their own pipe organs, samples pipes is more common.

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