I won mine in a quiz competition, so I didn't have any special project thought out for it beforehand. I ended up using it as a piano synth: running Pianoteq and hooking it up to a digital piano, it gives much better sound than the digital piano's built in sound (and far more flexibility).
I was worried about latency, and that I would have to overclock it (the guides I read on the net suggested I would have to). Latency was a problem in the start, when using the Pi's built in audio jack, but once I switched to an external sound card the latency vanished. Didn't even have to overclock it, though I added a couple of cooling ribs just in case.
Yeah, the RPi is known for having a somewhat crappy built-in audio adapter. I was doing some stuff with speech synthesis using espeak-ng, and using the built in interface it was basically unusable. Now to be fair, the espeak-ng voices aren't that great to begin with... but they're usable on decent hardware! I switched to an external USB sound card and that made a dramatic difference. It's back to where the default English voice sounds kinda like WOPR from War Games, and some of the mbrola voices actually sound reasonable.
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I won mine in a quiz competition, so I didn't have any special project thought out for it beforehand. I ended up using it as a piano synth: running Pianoteq and hooking it up to a digital piano, it gives much better sound than the digital piano's built in sound (and far more flexibility).
I was worried about latency, and that I would have to overclock it (the guides I read on the net suggested I would have to). Latency was a problem in the start, when using the Pi's built in audio jack, but once I switched to an external sound card the latency vanished. Didn't even have to overclock it, though I added a couple of cooling ribs just in case.
Yeah, the RPi is known for having a somewhat crappy built-in audio adapter. I was doing some stuff with speech synthesis using espeak-ng, and using the built in interface it was basically unusable. Now to be fair, the espeak-ng voices aren't that great to begin with... but they're usable on decent hardware! I switched to an external USB sound card and that made a dramatic difference. It's back to where the default English voice sounds kinda like WOPR from War Games, and some of the mbrola voices actually sound reasonable.