Installing SuperCollider on Windows 7 and 8 and dealing with 'Device unavailable' could not initialize audio'

After another break from SuperColliding and switching from OSX to a Windows machine I thought I'd share my experiences installing and setting up SC on windows.

A few years ago when I first started with SuperCollider the Windows port was something of a poor relation to the lead OSX platform and the up and coming Linux port, but things have changed since then and the latest Windows version seems pretty good so far. The only downside I've found so far is driver and hardware support issues, although this may not be much of a problem depending on what hardware you have.

Installing the latest Windows port is theoretically pretty easy, just head over to the Sourceforge repository and download the latest version of the installer. All being well it should install itself without any bother from the super easy to use config GUI and you'll be ready to go.

I had no trouble at all setting it up on my Windows 7 laptop, everything worked right first time, no issues at all. My Windows 8 desktop on the other hand was a bit tougher.

I'm not sure, but I don't think it was an OS issue, it seems more likely that it was a hardware driver issue with my motherboard's crappy on board sound .

After using the installer and trying to boot the server for the first time I got this error:

'SC_PortAudioDriver: PortAudio failed at Pa_OpenDefaultStream with error: 'Device unavailable'
could not initialize audio'

Very helpful. After some Googling it seemed like a driver problem and the solution was something I already happened to have installed, ASIO4ALL. This is a universal ASIO driver which gives ASIO support to a whole range of crappy Windows sound cards that don't usually support it. Windows SuperCollider apparently plays nicely with ASIO sound cards, so using this should help.

The next thing I needed to do was to get SuperCollider to talk to my sound hardware in ASIO mode, which was pretty easily achieved by running this line of code:

Server.local.options.device ="ASIO4ALL"

Which I added to my startup file so it runs every time I open up the SC IDE.

And, success! Well nearly, because for reasons I really don't understand sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Often when I boot the server ASIO4ALL says that the output device is unavailable and I have to disable it and enable it again to make it work. I think I might be better of getting a discrete sound card.

In short,

SuperCollider on Windows is pretty easy to get going if you are lucky with your sound hardware. If not Try ASIO4ALL, it's free and is very easy to install. It might be helpful.