busybee fluffy rambles

Just keeping track of stuff with my old and new VR PC.

Okay, it turns out that there was a lot of hidden magic on the SOMA Connect image that was infeasible to try to migrate/clone over myself, both due to dependencies on how the old-ass Raspbian image is setup in terms of networking, and a whole bunch of random/hidden scripts that do who-knows-what. So I decided to take a different approach, and modify the SOMA Connect image instead.

Last time I had a sorta-working shairport-sync configuration on my Raspberry Pi, but I didn’t have the SOMA Connect hardware actually working, and I had to make a bunch of compromises in order to get things to even try to start up without reimaging to the 32-bit Raspbian operating system.

Well, somehow the filesystem got corrupted and the device was refusing to boot, so I figure this is as good a time as any to document how I got things working in a much nicer way.

I’ve reorganized my bedroom and as part of it I decided to finally address the ongoing issues with my audio setup in there. I have an old AirPort Express which I was using as an AirPlay receiver so that I could play music and podcasts and such on the (rather nice) hi-fi speakers, but it’s been super unreliable as of late, and even when it does remain connected, it generates random popping noises on the speakers — not great when I’m trying to sleep!

So anyway I was looking up various aftermarket AirPlay receivers, and most of them are pretty expensive, but then I realized that there’s probably a way of receiving AirPlay on a Raspberry Pi, and yes, there is, and then just as I was about to look for used Raspberry Pis to install this on, I remembered I already have a Raspberry Pi, in my bedroom, in the very same nightstand I would be putting a new one in: because I have SOMA’s older smart shades which use a rebadged Raspberry Pi as their Bluetooth-to-HomeKit bridge.

And the SOMA Connect image is just running Linux (specifically Rasbian 10) and some proprietary software.

My current hardware setup: M1 Max studio in the office, M1 mini in the recording studio.

The Mac studio is great for editing video and doing compute-heavy tasks, and also has amazing peripheral connectivity which mostly goes unused. Connected to it I have an external NVMe enclosure, a second monitor, and a USB hub full of other stuff. Also a spare audio interface that it basically just uses as an unnecessary, overpriced DAC for my speakers and headphoens (and which I keep meaning to move to my gaming PC to get better audio for my VR concerts).

The mini in the studio is always short on connectivity options; it only has the two Thunderbolt ports, and could really use a third. It also has sufficient CPU for my music, but it’s a bit lacking in I/O, both because its internal 512GB SSD is slower than what’s in the Mac Studio, but also because it’s small enough that I have to offload most of my instrument sample data to a much slower external drive.

So what I need in the studio is more connectivity and more disk I/O, and what I need in the office is more compute…

My Bigscreen Beyond arrived today, right before I had to leave for choir practice. So of course as soon as I got home I set it up and tried it out. This is a quick first-impressions review.

So the new keyboard arrived today and I swapped it into my setup, along with the Akai MPK49 (which I also finally restored to working condition). Here’s some vague unstructured thoughts about it.

My impressions on the hardware, for what it’s worth:

• Really cool tech
• Kind of a solution in search of a problem
• I look forward to seeing what people do with it
• I look forward to it becoming affordable and usable for a lot more than just running fancy versions of iOS apps
• I will be way more interested if they let you apply filters to the external screen; why show a video feed of your boring human eyes when you can be your fursona or a protogen?

Yesterday my other big hardware upgrade arrived, a Focusrite 18i20 for my Mac mini in the studio, to upgrade the 18i8 I had before (which is now on the Mac Studio in the office).

The tl;dr: for most people the 18i8 is just fine and the 18i20 doesn’t really add anything. Consider the 18i20 only if you have a couple of fussy needs.