VCV RACK on Orange Pi, Raspberry Pi or Udoo Bolt

VCV Rack
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Hello everyone,

I’m currently exploring the possibility of running VCV Rack on a single-board computer and would appreciate any guidance or advice from this knowledgeable community. It would be awesome if we could put a long touchscreen bar inside of our eurorack rack.

I considering buying an Orange Pi 5 Pro, a Raspberry Pi 5, or a UDOO BOLT. Each of these devices seems to meet the CPU and memory requirements for VCV Rack. However, I understand that VCV Rack recommends a dedicated graphics card, which these devices do not have. They use integrated GPUs instead.

I’m also planning to use a touchscreen for a more interactive experience and an Expert Sleepers ES-9 for audio interfacing.

Has anyone tried a similar setup? If so, could you share your experiences? Were there any performance issues, and how did you overcome them? Any tips or tricks for optimizing the setup would be greatly appreciated. I also discovered Cardinal and Mi rack for Linux would this be a more capable approach?

Thank you in advance!

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Try this topic perhaps? → Building VCV Rack 2.3.0 For Raspberry Pi

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Saw this on YouTube recently, I do have an old Pi and audio i/o board somewhere but haven’t tried it myself.

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it can be done and also works quite well to some degree if you do not expect too much, but you’ll have to build rack and the plugins yourself for anything linux with an arm cpu/soc - i’m doing this from time to time for myself via GitHub - hexdump0815/rack-dockerbuild-v2: docker based build based on the rack v2 sources on armv7l and aarch64 on debian bookworm (i’m not uploading any builds anymore due to the vcvrack license maybe not permitting this)

some quick thoughts:

  • rack is not really optimized for touch screen usage - there are a few threads about this topic i think
  • if you are not feeling well with building rack and the plugins yourself, better use some intel device as this way you can use the regular rack binaries
  • there is also cardinal as a somewhat different spinoff of an older version of rack with builds for arm as well (just search for it and you will find it)
  • just as a proof of concept and for fun one can go quite far with that idea: the (most probably) smallest vcvrack installation :) :slight_smile:

good luck and best wishes - hexdump

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4ms meta module?

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