Latest 4.5beta Sonic Pi on newly released RaspberryPi OS bookworm

I long very late night/early morning to build the latest SP source and get it working on the new Raspberry Pi OS (bookworm) released 2 days ago. Its running under wayland and also using pipewire for sound connectivity. Working OK with a few wrinkles to sort out but looks encouraging.

Picture also shows pipewire connection graph using qpwgraph utility.

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Looks great :+1: :smile:
a bit too Pixi :exclamation:well… pix sell :wink: and even make sense… sometimes!

********************** THE END OF AN ERA ************************
Sonic Pi is no longer on the RPi ’ suggested software ’ menu …
Eaten by the Worm ? … Makes me sad …
Saddens me worse that the SPi version on the website won’t
install …

My build is coming. I already have a first binary debfile built. It will run under wayland (apart from transparency) but you can switch the os to X11 if you need that. Also all the audio is done under pipewire and it is easy to route your I/o
One or two small things to adjust and further testing of the build before I release it.

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You are a Savior … No doubt …
Seems ’ Bookworm ’ is not quite ready for primetime anyways …

Does your work towards getting SonicPi running on Bookworm foretell a x64 .deb package? :crossed_fingers:

Not at present. What I am buiding is a binary package with aarch64 packages and is built specifcally for Sonic Pi. It is not easy to package the present build of Sonic Pi into a standard deb format, and Also I don’t really have a suitable x64 machine on which to develop it.

Although I have a working package for the Pi, it still has some issues to be solved. At present it makes the blue tooth interface rather unhappy.

I also have it working on debian bookworm (arm64) version.

I got 4.5 running on my Raspberry 3B+, but it’s definitely underpowered. Time for a 5…

I also was able to install it on my Chromebook, but the Debian package for the Linux container is old (Sonic Pi 3.2.2), and jackd needs to be run by hand in another terminal if one wants Sonic Pi to launch. Is 4.5 coming to regular Debian too, annd bullseye (maybe as a back port)?

Hi Yves
Yes it struggles a bit on PI3B bot iit certainly works well on the Pi5. As far as other linux including Debian are concerned, we don’t have the resources to produce and maintain a full deb install for these. In the case of the Pi I maintain a binary deb file which installs SP under /opt, rather than in the standard locations. The PI is easier to support as it is known hardware and software. The 3.2.2 deb is very old and will not work properly under modern distros which are moving to pipewire for audio and it was produced externally. SP4.5 (btw it is a release now not beta) only runs on 64bit now because of the non-availablity of one component on 32bit.
Having said that there are two possibilities. First Sonic Pi is pretty straightforward to build from source these days. I have it built for debian Bookworm running in a virtual machine on my Mac, and it works well. (I used aarch64 as I dont have a suitable amd64 based computer)
Secondly there is a flatpak install available for Sonic Pi 4.5 which may be an option for you.

As far as bullseye is concerned 4.5 it doesn’t readily have the supporting packages, and to get anything working would require a lot of hacking.

Thanks! I think upgrading my Pi is definitely a good thing. (Small regrets for not getting the new 4 when I bought the 3B+).

Crostini will be updated to bookworm, so maybe building from scratch then will be a good option.

I don’t know anything about flatpack, save that it is a way to distribute apps. I can try to install it on my bullseye Crostini and see… Thanks for the pointer.

The flatpack installs and launches beautifully, and runs fast. Sadly there is no sound. Do you know how I can get sorry and help troubleshoot?

4.5 is designed to use pipewire for audio. Do you have that installed? I think the flat pak should install it. Also if you do, you can install qpwgraph to graphically check and make sound connections. By default SP should try to connect to your hdmi monitor speakers. If you use usb or audio jack on a pi3b+ you need to alter this. see a picture of the app here How to get inputs for sound_in? sound_devices mixer_info
You can use the pw-link command also from the command line. Try pw-link --help

My youtube video covers some of this form about 6:57 mins onwards.

I am running the flatpack on a Chromebook (which runs Debian Bullseye in a container, because I am expecting the flatpack to include all the dependencies it needs (Qt6, pipe wire, etc.)

Worth seeing if pw-link is installed and using it to check what connections are present and qwpgraph if you can install it.