September 3rd, 2010 § 0
So I decided to move all my posts from my old and slightly defunct Blogger account over to this here WordPress. It will fill in a bit of back story on the NDS sequencer and some of my other past projects.
I’ll be going through the posts gradually and re-tagging them to make it a bit easier to search through.
Edit: I’m also going to need to fix the code examples on some of the old posts, will try to do it over the weekend.
September 2nd, 2010 § 0
So this isn’t a SuperCollider post, as may be obvious from the title, but I don’t think I’m going to let this be a solely SC based blog when there’s plenty of other noisy stuff I do. About 18 months ago I started playing with writing homebrew software for my Nintendo DS. It was a good chance to improve my coding chops and try and learn a bit about the hows and whys of DSP. In the first instance I succeeded, my C/C++ improved pretty dramatically and it very much helped turn me from a hardware based Electronic Engineer into someone much more comfortable and happy with writing code.
Unfortunately things mostly stalled on the second front after I got my Midi sequencer working and then found other things to pursue. However, I’m now revisiting the whole affair and having a reasonable amount of success.
August 19th, 2010 § 0
So I’m finally writing this up! The code has been sitting around for about a week now and other stuff has just kept getting in the way. But here it is, finally.
So the first thing I should point out is my new found liking for the SuperCollider documentation. Whilst the parts that fly about on the internet are a bit hassle-some to sift through and can make it difficult to find the answer to the questions you want, the help functionality and documentation within the actual program is really great and very nicely laid out. Many of my questions are now being answered there. And don’t I feel like a muppet for doubting it to begin with.
Anyway, onto the code.
August 9th, 2010 § 0
So the initial estimates were wrong and apparently my Internet will be returned to me on Thursday. Until then all I have is access at work and that’s not quite sufficient.
As soon as Thursday evening rolls around , however, the post on control buses should go live. I’ve learnt quite a bit about them, mostly thanks to reading the very good docs (My opinion of the SC docs is changing quite substantially now) so there should be plenty to look forward to.
Guy
July 28th, 2010 § 0
So This has been dead for a week or two now. Mostly due to my moving into a new place and internet taking a while to sort. This is a pretty weak excuse but is hassle-some enough that it got in the way.
Next week once its all working and I’ve finished the next post I’ll get back to updating.
Hold tight
Guy
July 17th, 2010 § 0
So I’ve spent a bit of the last couple of days reading “A Practical Guide to Patterns” by H. James Harkins which is part of the SuperCollider docs and it has really helped me to better understand some of the major ways in which allot of stuff works. Mostly to do with patterns, but also about how synths are actually used within the environment. I definitely recommend it, but don’t get worried if you get lost not too far in, it’s a bit mind boggling after a while.
July 13th, 2010 § 0
So I’m gradually browsing around the SuperCollider docs and finding where useful information is. One of the gems today has been this page, which is a simple explanation of the client and server architecture.
This is something that I already sort of knew, but it’s nice to find it in a simple and concise format. The SuperCollider documentation feels, to me at least, overly spread out and requiring far to much digging to get at what a beginner such as myself really needs. This is something I would like to address, but for the moment I feel I’m better off spending my time getting to grips with everything.
I will be starting up a separate page where I will be aggregating the useful and concise information I find. Hopefully it will prove useful to someone.
Anyway, a quick set of bullets about what this helps me understand about SuperCollider.
Most of this is obvious but, again, I like concise information. I know that the Windows version of SuperCollider involves Psycollider in some way, I’m not yet sure how. Investigation needed, and will report back soon.
Guy
July 12th, 2010 § 0
So finally some code, a basic FM synth that turns on to generate screechy noises and doesn’t turn off until you tell it to. This is the beginning part of a grand plan as it happens but I’ll explain that later, first, the code. Apologies for lack of syntax highlighting, I’m planning to write or find a Word-press plug-in that will do it for SuperCollider code but until then it will have to look ugly.
July 11th, 2010 § 0
So I have SuperCollider working on my laptop, happily running under Windows 7. This in itself has been a bit of a learning curve, however, and this evening whilst helping a friend get his setup working, also on Win7, I discovered another confusing behaviour.
July 4th, 2010 § 0
…or “How I learnt to stop worrying and get SwingOSC working for SuperCollider on Windows 7″
I’ve been spending at least a couple of hours over the last day getting SuperCollider back up and running on my new laptop. Previously it was running fine on my, now dearly departed, WinXP laptop, but upon getting it installed on Windows 7, whenever I started it, I was greeted by a “SwingOSC cannot be started” error.
Most annoying….. Whilst this didn’t stop SuperCollider from working, it did mean that without a fix, I wouldn’t be able to control it from other programs using OSC. Also it’s just the kind of thing that annoys me.
Some Googling later and it seemed that this was a reasonably regular occurrence over multiple OSes and configurations. Unfortunately, the answers ranged between, use an older version of SC, and installing other Linux packages, none of which worked for me. This was after having done various re-installs of the Java run-time and SC itself.
Thankfully, after a bit more googling I found http://www.mcld.co.uk/supercollider/eee/ which, whilst being aimed at getting SuperCollider running on a Xandros netbook, had some useful info about editing the startup.sc file. Two extra lines in the relevant places and I have SwingOSC starting up fine.
GUI.swing; SwingOSC.program = "SwingOSC.jar"; g = SwingOSC.default; g.boot;
With that problem out the way, I can get on with the project at hand. A write up about my adventures making a big Granular Synthesis patch in SC. As well as other of my musical endeavours.
Guy