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Showing results for tags 'algorithmic composition'.
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https://kindohm.bandcamp.com/track/slipstream-jump
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Hello everyone. I never post here, but I do read up here a lot. -----------(Intro)----------------------------------------------------- Okay, so a couple months ago, I started learning SonicPi (and Ruby). This wasn't my first time programming, but it was my first foray into algorithmic composition. This was also the first time I ever got serious with OOP. Needless to say, I was blown away. Fucking ecstatic. Here was this algo-comp thing that always eluded me, and then Sam Aaron comes in and is like "Come my child. I will show you the way. EVERY STEP of the way". That tutorial makes it SO easy to learn this stuff. It was telling me what a "sustain level" is and I was like "pfft, whatever. I know this". But then in the MagPi tutorial he wrote: "and then when the loop repeats, the random seed is initialized again and the sequence repeats". And then I understood. PRNG seed-manipulation baby. This is how one "does the Aphex Twin". I was finally ready to get serious with making music. But frustration set in quickly because it's so damn hard to make a song transition. You can make cues and sync threads to them, but it's so unintuitive. And when you have a thread with random sleep periods, it gets even worse. Impossible for me. But really, I was missing my home, Renoise. Renoise is baby's-first-DAW. And boy was I homesick. Whenever I wrote anything in SP (SonicPi), I always wished I could select and paste 'track data'. And slice up drum breaks. And 'drag an FX slider' while a song was running. And don't get me started on how SP doesn't even have native midi support. So I found out about the Renoise 'tool' (an add-on, extension, etc.) xStream. And it seemed really cool and it'd be the answer to my prayers. I was so eager, I bought the 3rd edition of Programming in Lua (Renoise and it's tools are made with Lua). But there's no hand-holding tutorial for xStream like there was with SP. Actually, there's NO tutorial. Instead, I was told to "study examples". These examples had no comments in them. At all. Just a (commented) description at the top, of what the example did. And there were these very important functions/classes: xline and xinc. But there's no complete description of them anywhere. There's a documentation, but it's so incredibly cryptic and confusing and has zero info on how to use/implement the classes in it. (and xinc isn't even in the docs, despite it's central role). And now I'm running into issues with the PRNG, which is pretty much my favorite part of algo-comp. So fuck. That's no fun. --tldr-- I learned SonicPi, and I loved the flexibility that programming could bring to music. But using pure code to write songs can be frustrating: you can't sequence anything and you can't go back and change something. Only come up with better code and hope for the best. I'm used to a tracker interface, so I quickly because frustrated with these limitations in SP. I tried xStream in Renoise, but I need a hand-holding tutorial; xStream doesn't have any tutorial. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Do you guys have recommendations? For any suggestion: does that software have native VST and midi support? Or even better: can this software be used as a VST? The ideal (imaginary) situation would be that I could trigger/schedule SC code with Renoise, and that I could write SC code to produce input in Renoise. Something that could do that would be perfect. But, How about SuperCollider (SC)? I looked into using SC. Especially because SP is a client to scsynth (the SC sound synthesis server). I could slowly transition by writing SC synthdefs for SP, and then eventually fully switch to SC. But I'm hesitant to dedicate my efforts into SC because I'm certain I'll run into the same frustrations I had with SP. (Does SC even use real-time scripts like SP does?) I know that in SC you can make little GUIs to control your code. Is there a tracker-like SC GUI that will schedule my code for me? How well does SC integrate with midi? How about Max/MSP? It seems like it could have similar issues with scheduling parts of the code. But I heard that it can interface with Arduino and RPi pretty easily, which sounds awesome. Also, it can 'cross-modulate' between audio and video; To me, that equals "dank meme machine". Is the community friendly enough to let me rip their patches and use them however I please? Not that I won't learn it. I just need a quick-start. I haven't really looked into Csound or ChucK. Anything else is unknown to me.
