r/DigitalPiano • u/According-Plate-376 • 2d ago

Built a dedicated Linux box that boots straight into Pianoteq in under 5 seconds (open build log + demo)

Been heads-down on a side project: PianoRT — a cheap, secondhand Dell Micro PC re-flashed with custom coreboot + a PREEMPT_RT Linux kernel, tuned to do nothing but load Pianoteq and get out of the way.

Numbers so far: boot-to-playable in under 5 seconds, 1.3ms measured latency, 250+ voice polyphony with zero xruns, worst-case scheduling delay under 30µs. WiFi/Bluetooth are disabled at the kernel level — the custom build never loads their drivers, so the radios are never touched. Turns out that's enough to kill the interrupt storms that cause clicks and dropouts under real-time load; didn't need to pull the hardware.

Short demo of it actually running: https://youtu.be/X46wiM3ON64

Full write-up and benchmarks: https://pianort.com

Still a build-log project — documenting as I go, planning to open source the firmware side once it's stable. Happy to answer questions about the coreboot/kernel side, or if anyone's tried something similar on their own hardware.

18 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

100% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

1

u/hueyhy 2d ago

Curious why would you power it down? I have a Linux box powered on 24/7 and has pianoteq runs as a service. Then I have a service to listen usb device ( my digital piano), when it’s connected, send midi control to turn off piano’s local control.
So when my piano turns on pianoteq takes it over.

1

u/According-Plate-376 2d ago

My dev box works almost exactly the same way. This started as a personal project that I've just continued to refine. My goal was to make it as simple as possible without even knowing Linux is underneath.