Friday, October 30, 2009

Installing bbcut2 in OS X

I've just upgraded to OS X Snow Leopard and apart from it giving me the ability to take up serpents, drink any deadly thing and not be hurt etc, I also found myself reinstalling SuperCollider from scratch, including all the extensions, quarks and what have you that I had in my previous install.
Everything went smoothly with the exception of bbcut, which took a bit of work. I had the same problem when I installed it the first time round, but I ended up taking such as circuitous route to getting it working that I couldn't remember what I'd done by the time I'd finished. This time I took a more systematic approach and I've isolated the problem.
The latest version of the extension pack provided with the standard SC install includes some, but not all of the Ugens and classes that come with bbcut. If you follow the install instructions that come with bbcut you'll end up with conflicts and the class library won't compile.
To get it to work you'll need to leave out the three ugens in the bbcut2 ugens folder and the machinelistening classes from the bbcut2 classes folder when moving the bbcut folders to your SC directory. These seem to be the source of the conflicts and if you copy over the rest of the files as described in the bbcut2 help file it should all be okay.
If you've already copied these into your SC folder you'll need to make sure you delete the version of the files that come with bbcut and replace the them with the versions that come with the standard SC download, they are different and only the ones from the standard SC download will work. And that's jazz.

I've no idea how this goes on other platforms but I imagine there might be similar problems.

à bientôt.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Wicki - not wiki

Another soupçon of useful code from the SC-Users list, a Wicki keybord, as used by the Wicki system.
What's the Wicki system? I'm not entirely sure, but it seems to be a way of learning to play music with a type writer style keyboard. There's some background info available here and here.
This bit of code is a class that creates a Wicki keyboard, it is a bit long so I won't reproduce it on this blog, but you can download it here, along with a bit of test code. You can use the keyboard to record and playback sequences of notes, which are stored in an array, probably easier than typing frequencies or midi values directly into patterns and do things like transpose the entire sequence.
As with all SC classes you'll need to put it in the extensions folder and recompile the language before it'll work. The wickiTest file in the zip shows of some of the class methods, but it doesn't mention the startRecording and stopRecording methods. If you want to record an a array of notes you'll need to set it up by doing something like
m.startRecording
and then
m.stopRecording
when you're done.

Saturday, October 3, 2009

From Den Haag

Some great code from tn8, via the SC-Users list, the source code from a piece that she performed at the SC symposium. You can download it here.
It's a fantastic track and it's pretty rare to see the complete source for a song written entirely in SC, so it's worth a look.