Hi all,
I'm new to all of this. Not new to programming and music theory and
such, but new to actually putting the them together to Make Something.
So of course, when faced with the prospect of learning a new language
specially suited to this purpose, and being daunted in other ways as
well, naturally I did what any insane person would do (and,
incidentally, what many livecoders seem to do from my perusal of the
list archives)---I took on an even bigger project and wrote my own.
Right now, its a C synth library, using Jack on Linux, with a Ruby
front-end. irb is all I've figured out for interactivity on Linux,
but building an emacs-lisp interface shouldn't be too difficult. So
far, it is not terribly good for livecoding purposes. The syntax is
way too verbose. Also, I documented the C interface, even though I
expect people to use the ruby interface; that's just how my brain
works, I suppose. But I figured I'd release early and get feedback.
In particular, I am totally unsatisfied with how the sequencer object
works. ixilang seems to have some nice ideas that wouldn't be too
hard to implement. Impromptu's lisp-like callbacks may be a bigger
problem with slow-as-hell Ruby as well as the time synchronization
paradigm I'm using...
http://ebuswell.github.com/Cshellsynth/
Requires ruby 1.8.6 (1.9 sort of works, last I checked, but it's a Bad
Idea) and jack-1.95 or better. You probably will want to compile jack
yourself and up the maximum number of clients, as I have privileged
clean programming a little too far above practicality.
Questions/comments/flames/exaltations are welcome.
Evan
Received on Thu Aug 05 2010 - 01:54:51 BST