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Sonic Pi not working after installing HifiBerry DAC

James Richters

February 20, 2015 11:16

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I had Sonic Pi working through HDMI output immediately before installing hifiberry DAC and immedially after the install, it now just shows the title screen, and when I click on it, it just goes away. If I try again, it says it's already running, even though I don't see it anywhere. is there some configuration needed to sonic pi to output to hifiberry DAC? The HifiBerry seems to be working fine, if I play music from VLC media player, it is output through the hifiberry dac and sound quality is awesome. I would love to get sonic pi to work, my kid loves it and would be thrilled to have so much improved sound quality. Any help would be apreciated

James

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7 comments

• 0
  
  HiFiBerry team February 20, 2015 12:13

  Hi James,
  
  I don't know SonicPi, but maybe there is some kind of debug log somewhere. Have you configured the DAC as the only sound card? Did you configure /etc/asound.conf?
  
  Best regards
  Daniel
• 0
  
  James Richters February 20, 2015 14:24

  I think I have configured the DAC as the only sound card.
  
  /etc/asound.conf contains:
  
  pcm.!default {
  type hw card 0
  }
  ctl.!default {
  type hw card 0
  }
  
  I'm fairly new to raspberry pi, sonic pi came preinstalled with the noobs installation.
• 0
  
  HiFiBerry team February 20, 2015 15:09

  Looks good so far. Unfortunately I don't know SonicPi therefore it is hard to say, what's the problem here. Without any error messages I don't know what could be the cause for this.
• 0
  
  James Richters February 26, 2015 15:22

  I finally figured out how to see the errors, I've started a thread about this on the sonic-pi development forum, but thought I would post these errors here as well in case they give some clue.
  
  this is what I'm getting:
  
  in my .sonic-pi/log folder I have the following two files:
  output.log and errors.log
  contents as follows:
  
  output.log :
  Using protocol: UDP
  jackdmp 1.9.9
  Copyright 2001-2005 Paul Davis and others.
  Copyright 2004-2012 Grame.
  jackdmp comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY
  This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
  under certain conditions; see the file COPYING for details
  JACK server starting in realtime mode with priority 10
  control device hw:0
  control device hw:0
  audio_reservation_init
  Acquire audio card Audio0
  creating alsa driver ... hw:0|hw:0|2048|3|44100|0|0|nomon|swmeter|-|32bit
  control device hw:0
  configuring for 44100Hz, period = 2048 frames (46.4 ms), buffer = 3 periods
  
  Errors.log :
  jackd: no process found
  scsynth: no process found
  Cannot connect to server socket err = No such file or directory
  Cannot connect to server request channel
  jack server is not running or cannot be started
  Cannot connect to server socket err = No such file or directory
  Cannot connect to server request channel
  jack server is not running or cannot be started
  Cannot lock down 14130080 byte memory area (Cannot allocate memory)
  Cannot connect to server socket err = No such file or directory
  Cannot connect to server request channel
  jack server is not running or cannot be started
  Cannot connect to server socket err = No such file or directory
  Cannot connect to server request channel
  jack server is not running or cannot be started
  ALSA: Cannot open PCM device alsa_pcm for capture. Falling back to playback-only mode
  ALSA: mmap-based access is not possible for the playback stream of this audio interface
  ALSA: cannot configure playback channel
  JackTemporaryException : now quits...
  Cannot initialize driver
  JackServer::Open failed with -1
  Failed to open server
  Cannot connect to server socket err = No such file or directory
  Cannot connect to server request channel
  jack server is not running or cannot be started
  Cannot connect to server socket err = No such file or directory
  Cannot connect to server request channel
  jack server is not running or cannot be started
  Cannot connect to server socket err = No such file or directory
  
  ...snip... there are hundreds of the last 3 lines repeating...
  
  
  
• 0
  
  HiFiBerry team February 26, 2015 15:32

  Hi James,
  
  we have send a sample to the SonicPi developer. Form the log it looks like SonicPi is using jack. As far as I know, jack doesn't work right now with our sound cards. But I hope the developer can clarify things here. Maybe it is just a simple configuration to use ALSA natively without jack.
  
  Best regards
  Daniel
• 0
  
  justin April 20, 2015 23:16

  Hi,
  
  I'm having the same problem. Did you figure out how to use Sonic-Pi on a HiFiBerry in the meantime?
  When trying to start sonic-pi it halts at:
  > [GUI] - waiting for server to connect...
  
  I'm pretty sure this is a HifiBerry problem! Except from installing the HifiBerry card and doing a quick apt-get upgrade I didn't modify the freshly set up Raspian in any way. I just followed the instructions given on this (HifiBerry) website. HiFiBerry should work properly with the pre-installed Sonic-Pi.
• 0
  
  HiFiBerry team April 21, 2015 05:15

  Hi Justin,
  
  as written above, SonicPi by default uses Jack which is not working because it tries to use an interface (mmap) that is not supported on the Raspberry Pi I2S sound stack. The developer got a DAC from us, but we haven't got any feedback yet. Therefore I can't say yet if this will work in the near future.
  
  Best regards
  Daniel Matuschek