miRack is now available

May 1, 2018

miRack is a virtual modular synthesizer and is a fork of VCVRack with optimisations and tweaks primarily to run on Raspberry Pi 3, ASUS Tinker Board and similar hardware. Although it can also be used on macOS or Linux on desktop. See the announcement post for background information about this project.

Now miRack repository is available on GitHub - github.com/mi-rack/Rack.

Rack itself is an engine/plugin host, and the actual modules are implemented in plugins written by other developers. There's a lot of open-source plugins available which can be used with miRack (commercial and closed-source plugins will obviously not work on ARM CPU). These plugins have to be checked and optimised as well, and there are already some of them forked in miRack organisation on GitHub. The Rack repository includes a list of plugins I know about with their compatibility/optimisation status. Plugins from this list can be installed automatically, ensuring that an optimised version is used if it's available.

In general, I've made installation on Debian-based Linux (Raspbian and Tinker OS) and macOS as simple as possible, but please study README carefully. There are important differences from VCVRack and some platform-specific notes.

The plan now is to fix more stuff in Rack, check and optimise more plugins, and start thinking about hardware for a portable synth. Need to buy a touchscreen/case and some knobs I guess, tweak UI for (multi-)touch, and get rid of X server which affects UI performance too much on Tinker Board.