I recently got my hands on an Eigenharp Pico on eBay, many years after first encountering the instrument when it first came on the market and thought it looked like a lot of fun.
Now that I have one, I managed to get EigenD, Stage and Workbench installed on macOS Catalina using a package that was linked from this forum (EigenD-gpl-2.2.1-community-mac-i64.pkg).
So the three applications are running, the Pico is plugged in and the lights are on… but no sound.
This is probably an embarrassingly basic question, but what do I need to do you get the Pico to output sound? Will this be to do with the audio configurations in my imac? Do I need to plug the Pico into a separate amp? Have I accidentally got it on mute?
Any help would be very much appreciated. The set up video that came with the Pico implied a kind of plug-and-play immediacy, but it has not been the case for me.
also… what instrument do you have selected ?
the most likely issue is the samples have not been installed.
also the flute/cello is probably not working as its missing the convolution engine and samples iirc
yeah, the videos are rather dated, the issue being EigenLabs ceased development a long time ago, and the software (EigenD) has got rather dated, and this has not worked out well due to changes that Apple has made to macOS e.g. discontinuing support of python2.
(its a bit better situation under windows, as MSFT tend to not break things as they move forwards … though even thats changing )
many now tend to use Eigenharps alongside midi rather than use EigenD for sound generation.
I have attached a screenshot at the bottom of this comment, so you can see what I’ve got going on here.
You asked if I had set the audio interface in the menu. Which menu would this be? Do you mean the audio settings on my iMac (those are currently set to the internal speakers), or is this configured in the menu for one of the eigenD applications?
With the instrument selection, is that done in Stage or Workbench?
Does the screenshot below show if the samples are installed or not? If not, would I be able to download them from somewhere?
Apologies if these are very basic questions. I really appreciate you taking the time to help!
Thank you for this. With some more fiddling, I have been able to get some sound out of the Pico! It was specifically when loading up the Modular Synth setup (as opposed to the Standard factory set up).
So I’m off the ground now! I suspect that thetechnobear’s earlier comment about samples not having been installed might be the issue, since that would explain why the modular synth set up is working, while the standard is not.
I also get the impression that the eigenD application is a bit unstable on macOSx, as it sometimes stalls when loading, and often won’t shut down without force quitting.
if you like modular, perhaps looks at my VCV rack modules
if you’d like use with as a midi contorller, you could look at ECMapper
both of these are based off of my EigenLite library, which is much more ‘up to date’ for macOS, and support native arm builds. (whereas EigenD uses rosetta for apple silicon)
as for EigenD, it should be stable…
stalling during loading, it can take a while sometimes, and importantly do NOT switch setups… it is much quicker to quit EigenD, and then restart it to load a new setup.
in this vain, what I do (and recommend if you like to use different setups), is make the default setup on load to be the ‘empty/blank’ one.
this means you can quickly then load the one you really want quickly.
(ofc, if you always use the same setup , then you can just set that as the default)
as for crashing on exit, yeah, sometimes that can happen… its a bit unclear whats going on, its something to do with pico and the macOS usb stack ( * ) and some kind timing issue.
fortunately, its only a ‘shutdown issue’, I’ve not seen any evidence of it crashing during playing.
(you don’t mention which Mac you are using e.g. intel / arm, or which macOS version you are using.)
