Rhythm Stage Setup v5

I recently finished the largest set of changes I've made to my rhythm stage setup in 4.5y. The basic interface is similar, but I have a lot more flexibility, more control, more options, and it's easier to travel with. My favorite part is the speech recognition for calling chords. I started off playing mandolin and piano, and then over the years added progressively more expressive footdrums. I added a breath controller. I built out a complex but expressive system where these different interfaces could interact to let me produce a coherent rhythm section. After a frustrating experience moving from one Mac to another and wanting to simplify, I moved from the Mac to a Raspberry Pi, set it all up as a pedalboard, and then again as a lighter pedalboard. During the last year and a bit, however, I haven't been tinkering. It did what I wanted, in a reliable and portable fashion. And it was hard to modify: the pedalboard was static, and the Raspberry Pi code wasn't easy to get at either. Which was fine, and probably good for me! I just played a lot of gigs (23 Kingfisher, 3 Free Raisins, 3 Dandelion) and got better at it. But then it started breaking. My whistle synth box didn't always come up, the drums sometimes needed an external DI, and a USB sound card snapped. Flying back from Atlanta my gear suffered rough enough treatment to bend a USB B connector, and it was clear my system needed some love. I started with the most urgent portion: the whistle synth. I had Claude port it over to my laptop, where I turned it into a Mac app. This also let me add several more voices, and a mute option that never made loud clicks (I'm not really a hardware person). This project made me realize that AI getting capable meant that the tradeoffs around laptop-vs-embedded had shifted. I could have everything on my laptop, and without needing to put painfully large amounts of time into programming it could all be fully defined in code instead of manually-configured GUIs. Hav