Posts Tagged ‘Pure Data’

SuperCollider on Ubuntu Studio: Success!

{ Sep 27, 2008 @ 8:00 pm } · { Linux, Pure Data, SuperCollider, Ubuntu Studio }
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After some sessions using JACK to route audio from SuperCollider and other programs to effects, I must say that I’ve really enjoyed using Ubuntu Studio. Setting up JACK’s sound driver parameters was the main hurdle, but the Ubuntu documentation site helped me out for the umpteenth time. I used the settings in that how-to guide as a starting point, increasing the Period and Buffer sizes until I got no XRUNS, accommodating my sound hardware at a respectably low latency.

If you want to use SuperCollider, PureData, or similar software on Linux, I strongly recommend using a generic i386 installer, as opposed to a 64-bit kernel, even if your CPU can handle 64 bits. SC’s client will not run on a 64-bit system, Pd seems to have array bugs, the Flash player may not work, and some other sound software has issues with the amd64 distros. I actually went with the amd64 Ubuntu Studio release before giving up and re-installing with 32 bits. (As an alternative, you can run these programs in a 32-bit chroot, but this will probably entail long-term maintenance/upgrade difficulties in exchange for the near-nonexistent benefit of running a 64-bit OS. I could not justify the time and compatibility problems.) Once I installed the 32-bit version of Ubuntu and the Hardy SuperCollider packages, I was ready to go, with even the internal server functions working.

One facility of JACK is the ability to route each program’s inputs and outputs to each other, much like a patch bay. With all of the audio processing tools, including LADSPA plug-ins, that come pre-installed in Ubuntu Studio, I had quite a bit of toys at my disposal. Routing the outs from SC to FreqTweak produced some particularly interesting sounds suitable for real-time manipulation.

I’ll post some audio files soon to share results.

An adventure in Wubi

{ Sep 21, 2008 @ 4:16 pm } · { Generative Music, Pure Data }
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I’ve been learning ActionScript 3 lately. It looks like Flash 10 (Astro)will have some interesting new support for doing sound synthesis that should be an improvement over the current hacks using the BitmapData class, so I’ll be on the lookout for that. At this point, I haven’t had a lot of time to work on any generative music algorithms in Flash, but I’m hoping that will change soon.

It seems that the wikified documentation for Pd objects that I posted about long ago, Pdpedia, may have never gotten very far off the ground. I believe I stumbled across it months ago, but now I can elicit nothing but an error from the staging server. Maybe this is a temporary situation. If you know otherwise, feel free to enlighten me.

I’ve been wanting to install Linux for some time, especially since I was a bit frustrated with the incomplete state of the SuperCollider port for Windows (Psycollider). I also just enjoy playing with Linux; I keep a headless web dev sever running Debian, but I have used Linux little on the desktop, at least for the last several years. The problem was that I had no free partitions on my desktop’s HD, and I didn’t want to resize any existing NTFS partitions. Then I found Wubi, which will install Ubuntu using a file on a Windows drive as its filesystem. This was remarkably easy, once I downloaded the Ubuntu ISO for the amd64 platform and dropped it in the same folder as the Wubi installer.

Once I had Ubuntu configured reasonably well, I started installing packages from the Ubuntu Studio project.

I’m still waiting for that to download and install, but I found that there is a port of the SuperCollider server for AMD64 in the form of a debian package. I have a wedding to attend today, but I’ll be installing that tonight. Hopefully I can get all the bells and whistles working, and perhaps play with puredata, Chuck, or Csound, too.

Absenteeism & Reason 4

{ Nov 3, 2007 @ 5:09 am } · { Collaboration, Composition, Pure Data, Reason }
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I haven’t really been doing much of late on the programmatic music tip. Instead, I’ve been collaborating with a friend, Insert36, on arranging and writing new songs in Reason 4.0. I really don’t think I could have produced this kind of musical output with the previous versions, primarily because of the ratty old sequencer. The new Reason sequencer is much easier to work with, and it keeps things infinitely more organized and workable. I used to use Ableton Live and sometimes Cubase SX to arrange anything longer than a few bars, but I can get things done now without having to slave everything to a Rewire host and have 2 sequencers running. I’ve always gotten along really well with Reason, so take this with a grain of salt, but I really think that 4.0 is the most important product the Propellerheads have put out since ReBirth or Reason 1.0.

I’m still finding a little time to tweak on Pure Data here and there, but I haven’t reached a stage where I’m really getting any particularly useful results. Interesting — yes. Useful — no.

PdPedia online

{ Oct 2, 2007 @ 6:43 pm } · { Documentation, Pure Data }
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Something that should be a boon to new and intermediate Pure Data users, a wiki of Pd objects is now up.

Marius Schebella on the Pd mailing list:

At the moment we still use the address http://wiki.puredata.info, but it
should be http://www.pdpedia.org in the next [few] days/weeks. (At the moment, pdpedia.org is linked to a test site.)
The general idea of the project is to have better documentation of Pd, mainly – but not only – its object classes. I hope it will become a useful tool to search for objects and how to do things in Pd. The search field should really work as a “how do I…”
All objects have some basic information like a short description, library, categories, but we also dumped text that we found in the
help patches to give a little help for filling in content. That is the goal, to get many people involved in sharing knowledge about how to use the objects, document features, and so on.

So far, the documentation for Pd is not nearly as bad as I was warned it would be. I think the PdPedia is a great idea — all the core and extension objects documented in one comprehensive resource. The self-documentation of the program (Help patches) is quite informative, as well.

One quirk I’ve noticed is that both the mailing list and the main documentation wiki are both heavy with Quebecois. I’m glad that some of the documentation appears in French, but this also accounts for some seriously poor and distracting English in those pages, as well as some documents being impenetrable to someone who can scarcely order soup in French.

I have no explanation for this prominent Francophone Canadian presence. Interesting curiosity I suppose, though I’m still left wondering why the userbase is concentrated there. Perhaps its just a vocal Quebecois minority.

I keep forgetting to check the Cycling ‘74 docs and tutorials for Max, which I have heard are largely applicable to Pd.