Supercollider code how to#
Supercollider code install#

The SuperCollider language is based on SmallTalk and so will be familiar to Ruby programmers. The thing to remember is that when you start using a GUI, there is inevitably a restricted subset of things you can use it to do. People write their own GUIs to help them interact with scsynth in different ways.

Supercollider code how to#

Anything which understands how to generate OSC commands for scsynth can act as a client - sclang is just the one that comes bundled in the SuperCollider application ( more on that here). However, because scsynth will accept any communications via OSC, you could technically use any client you want. A GUI, though easier to learn, wouldn't be able to provide anything like that flexibility. You can literally build as many virtual synthesizers as your CPU can handle, and connect them in a seemingly infinite variety of ways. The musician will continue playing as you change the score, and will switch to the new score in realtime.Ĭoding in an OO client like sclang means you have full flexibility to build (and screw up) anything you want. You can manipulate the score, pull things out, switch instruments and effects. You can think of scsynth as the musician, actively playing from a song sheet, and sclang as the song sheet itself. We don't want to burden scsynth's clock cycles with that. The world of sclang is about providing a human-friendly editing experience - interpreting written OO code. It needs to be fed information in a way which can be quickly digested and acted upon. Everything must run on a regular clock and be timed perfectly. The world of scsynth is about hardware-accelerated, low-latency calculations - DSP. Well, they each do very different types of work. Why have two applications - scsynth and sclang? The objects you instantiate and manipulate from sclang are abstractions, each of which is designed to allow you to manipulate an actual sound-generating object on scsynth. The job of sclang (the client) is to interpret the commands you give as written code, and to send instructions to scsynth on your behalf.

The job of scsynth (the server) is to handle all the sound generators, filters, and waveforms it has been told about and to calculate values to send to the sound card.

Supercollider code install#

When you download and install SuperCollider it creates a client-server pair of applications - sclang and scsynth - which communicate via OSC.