Good evening, ladies and gentlemen
Adam Steel here resident music nerd and we're going to be talking about audio production today
But on as lower budget as we can possibly
Get so without compromising quality. So let's say that you're starting off from nothing and
You want to produce music?
You literally have nothing not a laptop not
Nothing, the way that I was thinking about starting to begin recently is using a Raspberry Pi
It's a tiny little computer. In fact, this is one of them. I got this this week
tiny little thing and
This is something I'm going to be talking about today
So in this first part
we're going to talk about how we're going to get this up and running what it is how to get things set up and
We're going to talk about a using Reaper which if he's not heard of Reaper. It's a digital audio workstation
It's kind of like Pro Tools. I think it's better than Pro Tools
I've made a couple of videos about this I check those out and
Also, it's much much less expensive you can use it for 60 days for free and then it keeps working after that
but if you want to pay for it, it's
$60, which is
Really cheap for what it does
It's really
Incredible and the Raspberry Pi the reason that I'm doing this video is this if I take the top off this was just released
This is a Raspberry Pi 3. Plus it's a quad-core processor
On it that's really kind of fast for the size of this thing. It's got a gigabytes of RAM on there and
It cost me 35
pounds so
Less than $50
now whilst you need to run one of these so you need one of these that's 35 pounds you need a
Power supply that you can get from the same places. You would buy one of these
This I think I paid eight pounds for this is a universal power supply. So this runs on anything from a hundred volts to
240 so this works in any country in the world on mains?
You'll need to get a specific end the plugs into your where your plugs are, but it will work
you also will need a
micro SD card because this thing doesn't boot off a hard drive and
this of course, you'll have seen these around probably this is an SD card and
They're fairly small if you look at it in my hand, it's small, but what you actually need is this little bit
Inside here. This is a
Micro SD card look how tiny that is
now a lot of bundles that you get for the Raspberry Pi come with a
Micro SD card usually eight gigabytes. I
Recommend getting a 16 gigabyte card minimum to run with this
I went with a 32 gigabyte card this one from SanDisk cost me 15
pounds so
relatively affordable so all-in
I can't have spent more than oh and I got a case for it as well. The the black case
this is called a hat case because it comes with kind of a lid you can take off and
I got that because you can add things on top of the raspberry pie with all these gold pins and
I might do that in the future. I might not but this case cost six pounds or something
They're cheap. It comes with four
USB slots and it's got a think it's Gigabit Ethernet
It's fast
Anyway, although the Raspberry Pi 3 and 3 plus come with Wi-Fi and bluetooth inbuilt
anyway, so even if you're not willing to use a hard wired Ethernet connection
You can just turn this on and when you get to the Ritz, we'll talk about later. It will just go
Oh, there's Wi-Fi. Do you want to connect and
You can sort that out like you would anything like a phone or anything else like that
So this has it also has just worth mentioning
HDMI a full size HDMI output so you can use this with any TV any monitor that takes HDMI and
It's also got a three and a half mil output Jack so that you can hear audio if you're not using the sound
through the HDMI
So Reaper, let's talk about that briefly that the reason that this video was inspired
was that
Reaper if we go to the download page up until now has been for Windows or OSX and
Very recently this changed
so that there was also Linux so as Linux I
686 which is 32 bit X
664 which is the 64 bit and then this one over here arm
V7 L which that doesn't have to mean anything to you. All that boils down to is
This is made for the Raspberry Pi which runs on a different kind of processes
So moving back to this
So if we want to use Reaper on here first
We need an operating system to run that on so that SD card
The reason that I've got my laptop here in front of this desktop computer is that one thing you need is an SD card?
Reader and you can borrow one from a friend
You can get really cheap one you can get
ones that tiny little USB things that can run just a micro SD card for two pounds
But if we're doing this on a budget you could just borrow one
I've got an SD card reader in the desktop machine, but it's so old it seems to have died
So I'm using the ones in built into this laptop. So if we plug that in I've been using
This for I've been using this inside the GoPro. So there's nothing on it right now
So what we want to do first is get a program called SD card formatter .
This is really good. I mean you can format the SD cards with Windows or with Mac OS OS X
But chances are you know, something might go wrong with using it with a Raspberry Pi?
If I was to use the SD card formatter, this will very definitely give me something that will work
So this 32 gigabyte card it comes up capacity
29.72 gigabytes quick format volume label. I'm not that bothered so I'm just gonna hit format
It will erase all data on this card. Do you wish to continue? Yes
Okay, so
fat32
Giving me a lot of numbers. We don't really need to know what those are. Okay now
The operating system that we're going to use is called
Raspbian it's a version of Linux
It's shot for Raspberry Pi
Debian, so raspbian, but you don't need to know that much about linux to me
it's cool to learn stuff because linux is getting bigger and bigger but
the the main points here are it's easy to install it's free and
it's
You know, it's really just kind of the behind-the-scenes thing for what we're going to use to get Reaper running. So
What I searched for was a program called noobs
Which is yeah, noob is quite often considered an insult in the gaming world
But here it stands for new out-of-box
Software yeah, so if we click on the the noobs installer I
Personally like to get noobs
Lite because noobs lite if you've got a network connection there you just drop the files from this
onto the micro SD card
So I've hit download its downloading there. So I'm gonna open that up when that's ready
And I'm gonna open our SD card here, and I'm just going to drag and drop
all of these files from noobs lite onto this Drive
Now that's it in terms of what we need the computer for so I mean
You know what I was saying with all you don't need a computer or you can't afford a computer
You can do this on a friend's machine you can you know
If you've got find an SD card reader you could probably do this that local library or something
You don't have to own a computer to do this because that was all
We needed the computer for that was it.
so
let's close this down close that down and
Eject that card which hardly has anything on it
And then we'll get to using noobs
once you've got noobs on the SD card, and actually when you're ordering
An SD card and a Raspberry Pi and everything together
From places like the PI Hut which is where I ordered mine from you can get them with noobs
Pre-installed so that you don't even need a computer at all. It'll just turn up in the mail and
It's ready. You stick the SD card in you turn it on and you go so from here
I'm going to plug the raspberry PI's HDMI input port
So what what could be any TV any monitor in this case?
I'm attaching this to my capture device so you can see what I'm doing
But generally speaking you can plug this into any monitor any you know
Anything's got an HDMI input. It should work and I'm gonna grab
The cheapest
keyboard and mouse that I could find
Which are not particularly spectacular. I mean if you can find
Some of these that just go in spare free great and you can get these new for five pounds
So it's not exactly gonna break bank
so
I
Want to pull over here
In Ethernet cable because I don't trust Wi-Fi if I can help it
So I'm gonna plug that in although if you're on Wi-Fi that works absolutely fine. And then last but not least. I'm gonna get this
micro USB
Power supply. I'm gonna plug this in
I'm gonna plug in the Raspberry Pi side first
i"m gonna lean over put this in we should suddenly have signal
We have lights and we have signal
Okay, so first thing we see is this rainbow screen that's noobs starting up and doing its thing
so we can see it's
Copying boot files to storage it's gonna do a lot of stuff that can be kind of scary
But you know, I've picked a big enough
SD card here that we don't have to worry now
This is basically giving us a choice of what operating system we want to install. So there's a few here there's
lacquer the
DIY retro emulation console? Well that sounds like fun.  There's Libre Elec which basically makes Kodi
There's a few on here, but the one we want is raspbian
you can have more than one and it will do all the technical things like
much code like
Changing partition sizes and all that kind of thing. It will do all that for you
So you don't really need to know how to do any of that super complicated stuff
But we just want raspbian
So in that case, we're just gonna click that and click install and if we hadn't plugged in an Ethernet cable here
it would be asking us about
What our Wi-Fi network was what our password was and you would just do that as you were done any other device?
So we just hit install any
Existing data on the drive will be overwritten
That's absolutely fine. That's entirely the point here. So now that's gonna download
4 gigabytes of stuff which is quite a lot
And if you're in the kind of country where the Internet's rather slow
Make sure you've planned out an evening for it to just tick along and do this. It will do it itself
You don't have to worry about any
prompts or anything at this point and
one thing that I'm I will talk about at this stage is
That this is a relatively fast processor in this Raspberry Pi 3, but the thing that will slow you down
From here is the speed of the SD card. I got one of SanDisk's ultra
Ones which I think of the kind of red and silver ones
I was using just a plain old black cheap 8 gigabyte card before this and it was
excruciatingly Li slow really slow and
I don't know if it can handle it
But if you get one of the I extreme gold versions of the cards, it would probably load up even faster
Then it had done in the past another clever clever thing
That's worth noting is it says nearly four thousand megabytes written here?
But it doesn't have to download that
Much it downloads it as like a compressed file and then does the rest and unzips it and does all that stuff itself
So you're probably only looking at one and a half gigabytes, maybe two
So if you're worried about data caps
It's not nearly as much also if you were going to download noobs
Somewhere else that didn't have a data cap rather than getting noobs lite if you got the full noobs that comes with
raspbian
Included there and it will do all the install and all that kind of stuff
without needing an internet connection
I've done it this way round because for me this is
Handy doing it this way
Okay OS is installed successfully
Let's hit OK
Wait for it to reboot and then see what it tells us now
So now we get a few raspberries in the corner and lots of text flying by I have no idea what that means
I'm fairly techy and I'm looking at it going. Okay. Yep, cool
But within a few seconds we get welcome to the Raspberry Pi desktop. Yes. Okay, so a few things to setup
tell it what country you're in a
Setting location, please. Wait, I
It's got a default password of raspberry. So you will want to change that password to your own
I'm just gonna leave it default for now because I'm likely going to just wipe and reinstall this anyway, and
Select Wi-Fi network, I can skip because I'm on
Hardwired here and then check that it's up to date. This is quite important
It's good to make sure that your operating system has all its files up-to-date for
security safety
basically, making sure that
The bad things are not going to happen
Do you notice around the edges of this screen is a big black bar as well?
That's under scan
So the next chance we get we're going to change that we're going to make the whole thing fullscreen. I think that's
so that if you use this on a TV
Then you get because TVs have this thing called overscan where they make the image a little bigger than it actually should be
Where a computer monitor doesn't do that. So for a computer if on a TV, you don't want to be losing
The really important stuff like the title bars or Start menus or whatever it is
But you can change that setting
relatively easily
So you can see it's downloading updates
So it's not going to take too long
At the end of this it will ask me to reboot and so we'll come back when that's done. I
Did also get which is worth talking about a
heatsink for the processor on this Raspberry Pi
But I can't find it. I was going to show you this on screen
I only got a short one
But you can get tall ones that take the heat better because if this thing gets really hot
it can slow down a little bit, however, and
This area has been tidied up by my other half which means that it's disappeared into the ether
Never to be found again
so I'm probably gonna have to order a new one and then when that arrives
install it and then the second I install I'll turn round and the original heatsink will be there where it was all along because that's
That's how it works
What do you believe it? I actually found it. I found this I went digging while it's installing the updates there
It's a tiny little heatsink that I've got. It's only a couple of millimeters tall
It should go some small way to helping wick some of the heat away
I would have got a taller one than this. They do ones. They're like a centimeter tall or more
But I figured that at some point I might want to get
Something that goes on top of the Raspberry Pi they call them hats. I'm like very much like hat that you would wear and that
Would obstruct it and would stop it in the metal would touch and cause all sorts of horrible
Problems. So I've just taken the adhesive off here. I'm just going to place it on top of these silver
Broadcom
processor chip I
Can already feel it getting warmer?
But that there because of the fins on that should help to take some of the heat away and I think I paid a pound
for that
So again, they're not expensive. I think it something like two pounds for the big ones
but they make sure that some of the heat can escape at least and
so
some more of the process that can be used because it's not
Overclockable I don't think the three plus because it already runs at 1.4 gigahertz as a quad core as a kind of a mobile
Style device. I mean, this thing's pretty much on par with a modern smartphone
But yeah, they're dumb fast. So they get really hot. So to avoid any
unnecessary slowdown
yeah, get heating if you're interested while these updates are installing if you want to see how the temperature of your
Process is doing at the top here
If we go to add remove if we right-click on the bar and then go to add remove panel items it
Tells us what panel applets we have available
I'm going to move that so we can state see the updates installing and if we click add
We can find in this big list of things
the temperature monitor
so if I add temperature monitor in and then put that I'll
Move that up, so it's next to processor usage
I
Thought I'll put it next to that spacer
We can see that the process is running at 56 degrees, which is quite warmer in  Celsius
56 degrees 57 degrees C. Hopefully that heat spreader that I've put on there is helping if I just blow on this a little
That has already gone down to 54 just with me blowing on it, so
That heatsink is obviously doing something they go 53. It's going down now
System is up to date
so it's asking to reboot so after we go
So every time we restart here, it's taking a little while, but at least it doesn't take too long
noobs is doing this quick enough and
We just went into the Raspberry Pi
configuration and
Chose to disable under scan, which was that horrible black
Bar, I had to go prolonged recording i seem to stop recording. So I'll quickly show you that one that comes in
Oh, yes, you can see this goes all the way to all the corners now if you go to the top left
goto preferences
Raspberry Pi
configuration
In here is a setting for under scan, which I then disabled you can set your resolution
Which there's a big load of settings there but
The one that I seem to have settled on at by default is the one that works best
There's all sorts of stuff you can disable or enable here so you can say no
But we'll talk about these maybe in another video because this is stuff. We don't really need to know
for right
what we're doing so
Let's go to the internet. So if we go to
The internet chromium web browser, it's Chrome essentially, but it's kind of like cutting edge version of Chrome
It takes a little while to load up because it's loading off an SD card
but as
we can see I
Was
Not using DuckDuck go go away
Okay, so we have full web browser and everything on here which is nice and useful
So we want to go to get Reaper now. So that's a Reaper . F M
So if we go to download Reaper, which is the top left and then down to Linux we can see experimental builds
That's kind of fair, I mean it's only been out for Reaper for a week two weeks
So we want to download the version that says arm v7 L. That's the Raspberry Pi
compatible version and
Yes, seven point three megabytes you read that, right? The entire of Reaper is tiny. It's less than eight. Megabytes. It's crazy
So if we click on that to open it
There we are we can see that so let's close down chromium and let's open a folder
Let's go into
Downloads, why not and
Just drag this folder leak repo Linux on v7
Out and extract it like you would a zip file or anything. So that's now out of its file
So you can actually just run Reaper straight from here
But what we really want to do is install it
So we'll total look at the readme and at a time
The install - Reaper des H what you want to do with a dot SH file? That's a terminal script
That's something that is very common in Linux. So what you want to do is right-click on it. Ah,
So if we just go to open it, it gives us a choice to execute or execute in terminal
That's what we want to do is execute this in
terminal because then it gives us choices and that kind of thing which we can see and
We want to be able to do all this stuff
Now I'll zoom in
Here because this is pretty important stuff
but you can see the choices are run Reaper without installing it install Reaper via the readme of course a
Desktop integration know what I wrote. What I want to do is I want to install it
So if I got I for install
So install to /opt or
Home slash PI /opt I
I'm gonna go for just slash upped
Because that's kind of like more of a root file. It's gonna ask for things. Would you like to add desktop integration?
That means it is gonna be a nice little button in the kind of a Start menu type things or yes, please
Would you like to symlink? Yes your
Proceed with installation. Yes
Installation complete done. So if we close that terminal down we should find now
A sound and video Reaper is in our start menu top left. So if I click that open, oh
look
the familiar
Reaper so that's gonna pop open I can now all screen that
So here we are at the familiar
Reaper
Setup, I can start adding channels in there. If I was just mixing here. I could set up my audio device
Which you can see me do in the Reaper 101 basics tutorial that I did if you not check that out already
Please do
So we'll be choosing input devices and output devices
Here, I'm sure and then we'll be 18. Okay
We'll work out the finer details I'm going to do a second follow-up video on this
But before we do, let's just close Reaper down
And
Let's just try something that that's install we don't need that folder anymore
I'm going to try something
Which is I'm going to try and plug in
My audience ID for this is a bus powered interface
It plugs in via USB and that powers it
So, I don't know if there's going to be enough power available on the Raspberry Pi to do this
if not, we'll have to find a way around this but let's see if this works so
I'll plug that in and
It's clicked at me the status on it is green
let's just have a look at so if I right-click on the sound up here, I can see ID 4 so
If I look at sound card ID 4
Select controls
Internal clock validity don't know what that's all about. But
The ID 4 seems to have plugged in. Ok, so if I go back to Reaper
Let's just see
If I can select an audio device, I think Al sa is what we want to be using
so if we use input is ID for output ID 4
bit depth
24-bit is what I want to be using
and
hit OK, I
Just heard my I default go crunchy click if I hit play we're off. So if I was to download something and
Play it there. I think I'd be able to hear it
in my
Let's just try that. I'm just gonna go and
Let's just have a look at effect. And
see because it comes with all of
the
A.j. S plugins all of the reaper Koko's vsts. They're all included
So if you've ever seen me or anybody else mixing with reapers stock stock plugins, they're all here
If I go to re synth
Pretty sure if I added in a
Midi so if I go to insert new MIDI item
and make sure monitoring is on and open that up and just
Yeah, so I can see I
Can see MIDI
Doing things here
So it's not particularly pretty but if I just leave that
I'll get the sound working in the next video because if I loop that I
Can see it I
Mean look if you can see that on the front of the ID for that sound there
In Reaper, the synth is coming out at the interface. So if I was to stick
headphones in it
Well, why are they sort properly next time but if I if I plug that in?
So that is Reaper making sound with a relatively low latency
Which I think we can adjust and play with so where it says 5 to of samples. I bet I can get that down like
128 because it's class compliant. Yes, so 2.9 millisecond 8.5 millisecond latency
yeah, it's
It's getting used to it now
but that's that's some audio coming out at 128 sample latency on a tiny little
Raspberry Pi
so
That's step one
next step is going to be we're going to make a video where I'm gonna do a bit more in-depth investigation into
plugins because any
Plugins that you use for Windows or OSX won't work straight off the bat
But they may be able to work if we can either find a Linux version
Or if we can find a way to get them to work
So I hope you enjoyed this video and like I said
Ladies and gentlemen reaper working on the Raspberry Pi with all its plugins and all that kind of stuff
Ready?
Going working. So thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed this one
Stay tuned to the channel for more audio production videos. We do a lot of gear reviews
We're talking about things soon like stereo subwoofers in a recording studio
We talk a lot about virtual guitar amps real guitar amps
modeling and all that kind of stuff
live sound tips and I want to say a big thank you to our patrons on patreon who helped us to
Do these kind of videos because your support means an absolute load to us?
So if you've not checked out our patreon already
That's a way that you can help us back out in return for doing all these kind of videos
Because we do have you know bills to pay and it really helps us out
So, thank you everybody for supporting and thank you everyone for watching
I'm adam steel for Harpo Studios, and I'll see you in the next video. Goodbye
Thanks for watching guys
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