FAQ
- Why did you write this software....?
- How do I make music with it?
- Can I use my Dualshock 1/23/4, XBox Controller or generic joystick to control playpi?
- I have made my track, how can I master the output?
- How many samples can I playback at once?
- I have a slow sd card/network, I am worried my play back will suffer?
- Can I help?
- Can I make a feature suggestions?
- I have found a bug!
Q. Why did you write this software?
A. Sequencers are very expensive, I wanted to learn python and I want to give something back to the open source community.
Q. How do I make music with it?
A. Playpi is built about steps,sequences and patterns. Steps make up sequences and sequences make up patterns. So very simply...for each step in a sequence no,one or more samples will play depending on what you chose. You keep adding steps to sequences (either manually, but you can also clone a sequence) until you are happy. Then you arrange you sequences into a patterns to create the desired journey of you track. So sequence 1 could be your intro, sequences 4 5 6 being verses and 2 3 being bridges so your pattern might look like "1 2 4 2 5 3 6".
Q. Can I use my Dualshock 1/23/4, XBox Controller or generic joystick to control playpi?
A. Are long as you can read and map the output you can use what you like! I will be building in keyboard and joypad support in later versions.
Q. I have made my track, how can I master the output?
A. I am hoping to let you do this on playpi eventually, but you now you will have to output into a recording device, either your laptop,pc minidisk recorders........
Q. How many samples can I playback at once?
A. I have happily played back 16 at once, but I have not actully tested the maximum. Roughly you are talking about 1/2% cpu per sample. With the playpi software sitting at about 10%cpu during play back (I will be optimising this in the furture, but its not actully limited me so far).
Q. I have a slow sd card/network, I am worried my play back will suffer?
A. Playpi loads the samples into memory as pygames objects inside a dictionary before and during (if you can live programming) play back. So if you have a slow what ever its the loading into memory for the first time that may take a while.
A. If you want to, but not just yet. I need to get a bit better at my python programming, and be sure I know what direction I am going to take the software/hardware in.
Q. Can I make a feature suggestions?
A. Yes please! Please send me an email to the address in the footer.
A. Please send me an email to the address in the footer.