Introduction

In the past year I have discovered the world of virtual pipe organ software, and must confess that I've become a little obsessed with Virtual Pipe Organs (VPO)!

Part the way through 2007 we bought the EastWest Orchestra sample set for Native Instrument's Kontakt player. This provided us with a wonderful background Orchestra for Andre to compose with (and me to play around with), a beautiful piano, lovely violins, trumpets, etc. But no Pipe Organ. So I went on a search to find a Pipe Organ sound that we could use.

The search results led me to the Miditzer 216. I'm sure many other virtual pipe organists began with this wonderful program from Jim Henry, it truly is a marvel. The Miditzer provides a virtual Theater pipe organ (VTPO) experience. I'm a classical organist, but just loved all the effects, bells and whistles that were available on the theater organ console too.

Due to the success of the Miditzer I continued looking for other virtual pipe organ software and discovered Hauptwerk v3, and the open-source look-alike of Hauptwerk v1 - MyOrgan. This lead me to ASIO driver research, and eventually to the ASIO4ALL driver project. This helped reduce the latency of Kontakt and of the Hauptwerk/MyOrgan organ dispositions. At this point we had what we were looking for (or so we thought).

Then two projects related to VPOs started me on a journey that probably has no real end, but lots of fun and learning on the way. The first was a message on the theater-sf forum from Russ Ashworth asking for volunteers to test getting Miditzer working on Linux. I've dabbled with Linux since the mid-ninetees so volunteered to help Russ out (Russ is in Canada and I'm in South Africa). We began looking at a few distributions of Linux (Ubuntu Studio, Jacklab, and a few others) but eventually settled on Puppy Linux because of the small size and ease of install and use. Puppy 3.00 had just been released, followed by 3.01 which fixed a few critical type bugs.

The end result of answering that email was the Puppitzer CD image that is available from Kent Allman's site. I learned enough about using Puppy Linux that I could install all the software necessary to run Miditzer (WINE, fluidsynth, JACK, Qsynth, etc.) and then created a CD that everyone could use. My love for Puppy Linux was kindled through this project.

The second project that ties into VPOs (and my obsession!) was the need for Pedals. We have two MIDI keyboards, so Great and Swell manuals are covered nicely. But playing a VPO without pedals falls far short of a true pipe organ experience. So I phoned around some of the Pipe Organ / Electronic Organ companies left in Johannesburg. I wanted to purchase a second-hand set of pedals and convert them to MIDI for Andre for Christmas. About the third or fourth phone call produced a possible pedal board of 30notes. Victor, of SA Organ Sales and Services, had a contact (Frank) who sold me the set of Ahlborn pedals. They, however, really wanted to know what I was going to do with them, so I invited them over for coffee and showed them the VPO setup that we had (the two MIDI keyboards running on a MyOrgan +-50 Stop disposition).

Well, to say that they were impressed with the sound and usability of the software is an understatement. Being in the Organ market in SA they saw an immediate use for this technology within the Churches that they deal with. Most Churches can no longer afford Pipe Organs (a GREAT pity), and even the Electronic Organs are out of the reach of the average congregation. So Victor and Frank asked me to get involved with a project that would provide MIDI keyboards built into Organ Consoles with computers inside that ran VPO software...

That began the search for a complete Free Open Source based VPO solution and MIDI interfacing that could be built in South Africa. Re-enter Puppy Linux and WINE, this time trying MyOrgan. There was too much latency as the sound had to go through the WINE sound emulation layers, so the search for an alternative was on. This was when we discovered jOrgan. Wow, what a journey so far! And what a wonderful organ interface toolkit and gui jOrgan is! I had by then discovered a distribution of Puppy called 'Fat Free Puppy' that had all the extra bits of software stripped out, so I just put the neccesary software on to make jOrgan work with Qsynth. That was in February 2008. The time since then has been taken with developing a MIDI interface board -, one project using PIC microchips and another using Atmel chips with a USB interface. The PIC16F877-A boards are now ready for action and I'm in the process of converting a two manual electronic organ to the MIDI/Puppy/jOrgan system as a prototype for the Virtual Church Pipe Organ project.

While all of this has been going on I've also worked on SoundFonts, converting some of the free MyOrgan sample sets to the soundfont format. I've also made my own jOrgan skin, based on photos taken from the pipe organ console at Church. jOrgan has also been in constant development since then & we now have the fluidsynth and the LinuxSampler extensions to play with.

I've put this site online to help other people build their own Puppy based VPO/VTPO, so use my experience to build your own special system and then share your experience with others too...