DemiurgeOS: A Thoughtfully Designed System for DSP on the Raspberry Pi

Emory Smith · Ilai Gilbert · Ajay Kapur

California Institute of the Arts

Draft — Linux Audio Conference target · system running today

Abstract

DemiurgeOS is a flashable, audio-first operating system for the Raspberry Pi 5 — a modern successor to Stanford CCRMA's Satellite. Every major audio language ships pre-installed and pre-wired — Csound, Pure Data, SuperCollider, ChucK, Faust, Strudel, C++, Python — routed through a unified PipeWire abstraction and tempo-locked to a global clock. Programs never see hardware: everything moves through one virtual sink and one shared MIDI bus, so hot-plug is invisible and a second interface aggregates automatically. The whole system is driven from a single hot-reloaded config file. Edit one file, reboot, perform.

Paper not yet written

Structure

  1. Introduction — the Pi as instrument, and why Satellite needed a successor
  2. The sync layer — virtual I/O, the MIDI merge bus, invisible hot-plug
  3. One config surface — live.conf, the Rust patch-graph launcher, hot reload with graceful-failure re-routing
  4. Clock and sync — demiurge-clock at 24 PPQN, BPM on ch16 CC119, optional Ableton Link
  5. Control surfaces — terminal companion, Python web GUI, power presets
  6. The performance pack — core isolation, quantum 128, overclock, thermal watchdog
  7. Remote microcontroller flashing over SSH
  8. Evaluation — seven languages verified bidirectionally; latency and reliability benchmarks
  9. Future work — public flashable image, OMNIPLEX transport folded in, classroom deployment

Resources

  • OS Core — PipeWire layer, virtual I/O, global clock, boot config, performance pack
  • Launcher — the zero-dependency Rust patch-graph engine
  • NAM — Neural Amp Modeler as a chain stage
  • Web Control — browser control surface: telemetry, patches, power, transport
  • NEPTR — the instrument running on top of it