OK, I look forward to hearing more about overtone.

Getting audio software/libraries to work always seems to be a bit catch-as-catch-can; there are various gotchas on different operating systems. Jack (jackaudio.com) is one of the common underlying platforms these things use.

Supercollider has been around for a long time, and should have stable sources foro multiple platforms.

Good luck...

Hi Jim.

I've been working on trying to get Overtone (http://overtone.github.com/) and Supercollider (http://supercollider.sourceforge.net/) to work on my system.

I thought about making more bend sensors but I haven't gotten around to that yet. On that same topic, I now have some neoprene (which I previously lacked) so I now have all of the materials to make said bend sensors.

Overtone requires quite a few dependencies. I followed these instructions that were given in the readme (README.ml):

... ### Ubuntu Quick Setup: sudo apt-get install jack-tools ant sun-java6-jdk fftw3 qjackctl You'll need to get the jack audio daemon running, and we recommend qjackctl to figure out what command will be best to use. Then once you have it dialed in you can switch to using the terminal. For best performance you need to install a realtime enabled kernel, which allows the audio system to get high scheduled immediately when there is data to process. With purely generative music this isn't such a big deal, but if you want to jam with other instruments or process external sound in realtime then you'll want to invest the effort in setting up an rt-kernel. Ubuntu studio makes it pretty easy, especially if you aren't experienced in compiling the kernel. In the meantime, just turn-off the realtime support in the qjacktl options, and the audio server should boot. Future versions will also support ALSA audio. Download and install leiningen wherever you local executables go: wget http://github.com/technomancy/leiningen/raw/stable/bin/lein chmod u+x lein mv lein ~/bin lein self-install Now get Overtone: $ git clone git://github.com/overtone/overtone.git $ cd overtone $ lein deps ; In Linux you can create a .jackdrc file with this command ; to automatically start the jack server on boot, or you will need ; to run it manually to start the Jack audio server. $ jackd -r -d alsa -r 44100 ; or use qjackctl for a gui $ lein repl user=> (use 'overtone.live) ; sin-osc creates a sine wave at the specified Hz (440 in this case) ; and pan2 makes the signal stereo ; demo simply plays the synth for the specified time in seconds: user=> (demo 5 (pan2 (sin-osc 440)))) ...

Along with their "Getting Started" documentation (https://github.com/overtone/overtone/wiki/Getting-Started) was enough to have me gain a basic understanding of a few functions. I still haven't gotten chords or anything really interesting to work.

It turns out that really pretty video that was on their front page is tied to an emacs extension (?) which I initially thought was sort of poorly documented (https://github.com/overtone/live-coding-emacs). Upon looking around a bit more, I discovered two instructional videos for getting his (this guy: http://vimeo.com/user568137) environment up and running on emacs. (http://vimeo.com/25102399 and http://vimeo.com/25190186)

About Supercollider, I briefly tried installing it from a ppa but apt-get failed somehow. I guess I'll try installing it from source.

http://cs.marlboro.edu/ courses/ fall2011/jims_tutorials/ aaron/ oct_14
last modified Saturday October 15 2011 4:19 pm EDT