Over the last year or so I have used the version last published on the Raspberry Pi (see starting  here and most recent entry here).  I had hoped for a Raspberry Pi 4 to speed things up, but the rather disappointing 3B+ just did not provide the leap in performance I think was needed. I grew increasingly annoyed at the slow response, notably when enumerating the library, but also on page renders. I also found it to be occasionally erratic; after long periods of being idle it simply would not work.

So I dove into re-doing it on a new board.  My first attempt was a ROC-RK3328-CC board, similar to the Rock64 board. I gave up on this after about a day – the card just lacked mature software, and I wanted to spend time making the application work better, not chasing after idiosyncrasies of the card and failures of the vendor.

So I next decided to try a Atom processor, notably the Z83 variants based on the Intel chip. In this case, I found that a lot of 2GB variations of this were quite cheap, I believe because Windows 10 had outgrown 2GB (or mostly so).  So as of this writing I could get a Z83 with 2GB memory and 32GB eMMC disk for $99, whereas the same with 4GB/64GB was $180.

This was non a completely simple install either, there were a number of issues with the hardware and drivers, but I found a path through the options so it will (mostly) work with distro software only, just a few tweaks.

And it is MUCH faster.

I think at this point I am leaving the “Pi” behind, though I still choose to call the result as “MusicalPi” in honor of the cheap board that got me started.

I also fixed some bugs in the initial version that showed up during testing.

There results can be found here: https://github.com/Linwood-F/MusicalPi and the Wiki has more details on installation (the Pi version is still there, be sure to look at the right one, the checked in code is for the Z83 though, I am no longer maintaining the Pi version.  If you want it grab commits before about July 2018; most of the differences though are just additional code for getting that linux to work, the QT code is more or less the same.