Overtone 0.9 Released

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Version 0.9 of Overtone, the Collaborative Live Coding toolkit, was recently announced. Overtone provides a Clojure language front-end to the SuperCollider synthesis engine with a strong emphasis on functional programming and concurrency.

This release represents a fundamental shift in their development approach. Instead of designing and implementing new abstractions that may possibly prove useful, all of the features and modifications in this release have been implemented as a reaction to specific performance/composition requirements.

One of the major users is the Clojure powered band Meta-eX and they have been using and testing 0.9 in all of their recent gigs, including a straight hour techno set in Club Noxx, Antwerp.

So, what’s new? For an extremely detailed overview check out the official release notes which walk you through each individual change. Major improvements/contributions can be summarised as follows:

  •  apply-by/at improvements
  •  Improved synth positioning syntax
  • MIDI API revamp
  • New Graphviz support
  • Bus monitoring system
  • Simple persistent key value store
  • More pervasive stop fns
  • Node event handlers
  • Improved envelope helper fns
  • New workshop examples contributed by Toxi

If you want to get started live coding with Overtone, check out the install instructions and head over to the mailing list for answers to any questions.

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