The Roland MT-32 is a legendary MIDI synthesizer that few owned, but many knew. Of course nowadays you can do the emulation in software easily (actually this project uses mt32-pi which is software emulator for Raspberry Pi). But What is nice is that you can use this with retro PCs that output actual MIDI signal. Also looks pretty nice.
The tower consists of the following pieces:
- Input Switch. Which is basically a relay based MIDI input switch if you have more MIDI sources than one (let’s say PC and Player).
- Audio Switch. A pretty standard six input audio switch that is using relays.
- Play. An Arduino based MIDI player. Files are loaded from SD card. Output is a MIDI signal.
- BulkyMIDI-32. The most important piece. It takes MIDI signal and outputs audio. This runs mt32-pi on Raspberry Pi 3+.
Here is a test: