navindra (Slashdot reader #7,571) is a professional coder and an amateur musician. He writes:

Music and technology have always been intertwined and this has never been truer with computer technology. I set out on a simple quest to find a better metronome, settled for a digital sample sequencer, but ended up fascinated by the Organelle music computer running Pure Data on a Raspberry Pi and Linux.

“The entire system runs open source software and may be customized at every level,” explains its web page. From navindra’s article:
[T]he Organelle is hard to define, but it is nothing less than a music computer, almost demanding that one ascend from mere musician to virtual instrument designer.

Organelle patches are readily available for beat-making purposes, including sample sequencer or drum machine functions, multi-dimensional sequencers, and, yes, even a straight up metronome. Beyond the factory patches, the user community contribute their own creations… Pure Data code initially looks like low-level symbolic code — fortunately, it is easy to make something musical in short order, if one has a handle on sound synthesis and MIDI concepts.

The Organelle runs Linux on a Raspberry Pi with everything that entails — it has a boot up time of 12 seconds, yields a 6 hour battery life on 4 AA batteries (roughly proportional to the volca power draw), and things like swapping samples is trivially done with a file manager, eliminating the need for special software. Similarly, adding or modifying patches is just as easy — modifying the existing Metronome patch with a new sound could be as easy as dropping in a new .wav file.

Needless to say, the Organelle is constantly evolving and improving…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Metronome or Music Computer? Music Geek Tries the Raspberry Pi/Linux-Based ‘Organelle’