Gemini for Music

[Rosie]

I thought I'd add this topic as one of my reasons for getting the Gemini was to be able to create a bit of music.  I spend a lot of time working away from home and having something as small and portable as the Gemini that could be used would be absolutely perfect.

The story so far...

Despite being a little poorly the Gemini works fine with Depmod (you can find that on the play store).  I use a Behringer UCG102 to plug a guitar into the phone, mostly because I know it works with Android and I already had one.  Things I know that don't work:

• The right-hand USB port
• A USB-C hub

I'm using a cheap, generic USB-C hub (Advent ATYC41HB16) so different hubs might give different behaviour.  THe light on the UCG102 cycles on and off rapidly and thre's a buzzing in the headphones.  I'd guess that the hub is cycling through its ports and not supplying power to ports it's isn't listening to but that's total guesswork.  Using a USB -> USB-C single converter works a treat.

I'm going to have to hold off flashing a Linux image until I've got the keyboard working again (not Planet's issue, I was clumsy) but once I do I'll be looking to get Guitarix working (I do love that program).  Once that's sorted it'll be Ardour and possibly a virtual instrument or two depending on how much the Gemini can cope with.  If anyone else is thinking along the same lines and gets further down the path than I am now I'd love to hear how you got on.  I'll update this thread as and when I make any progress.

Rosie

[ArchiMark]

Very interesting, Rosie...

As a fellow guitar player, interested to hear more about this as you progress....

Thanks,

Mark

[Rosie]

The lovely folks at Planet have replaced my Gemini despite the incident with the cider as the RH USB socket wasn't working as expected pre-cider.  It should always have been able to support the UCG-102 from the RH USB and the new one does.  RH USB is still quite noisy when using DEPMOD though.  The LH USB is better but still a little noisy but my other experience with Depmod suggest that it may be a software issue rather than a hardware one.  Certainly Depmod can be a little idiosyncratic which is why I'd never use it for anything otehr than practice.

On the Linux side, it all goes in OK after a little bit of faff.  Guitarix exists in the ARM builds so a:

sudo aptitude install guitarix

will get it installed along with jackd and any other dependencies.  Aptitude probably isn't necessary and isn't part of the firmware but I've always used it so grabbed it from the repos.  I've tried with real time permissions set (a prompt during the jackd installation) and without but in both cases it crashed the OS and caused the Gemini to reboot when starting jackd.  I've been a little short on time so haven't had a chance to dig into why just yet, hopefully I'll get a chance this evening.

If anyone has got any further than this I'd love a few pointers.

Rosie

[ArchiMark]

Just installed Guitarix on Gemini in Debian....

During install, it asked me about jackd, but said if you say Yes to permission request, it will devote all resources to it, which may cause device lock-up problems. So, think that is what happened to you, Gemini doesn't have enough power to devote all the resources to it. So, if you can figure out how to reverse this, you might be OK.

HTH,

Mark