Re: [chuck-users] future of ChucK

I can't speak to the future of ChucK itself, but recently I have been
giving a lot of thought to MY future with Chuck. First off, I love ChucK
and all the cool stuff it let's me create. I find it much more intuitive
than any other audio programming language/environment I have used and I can
usually create something along the lines of what I set out to create with
it. My problem with it is that I really want to be able to create stand
alone apps and plugins with it, which I have not found any way of doing. I
would like for my software to be usable by the average musician, not just
by programmer-musicians who can read ChucK code (though we are a cool
bunch). I know ChucK Racks were just released (for Macs,which I don't use)
but as I understand, this just let's you run ChucK scripts as a plugin, and
does not provide a way to wrap up the code in any UI to distribute to
musicians who are used to sliders, knobs, presets etc.
So I guess I have a few questions for everyone/anyone here: is there a way
to use ChucK in a mobile or desktop app? Is there a way to connect ChucK to
a GUI that is simple enough that non-programmers could use it? If not, is
there another language / libraries for another language like python, for
example, that has some of the great, intuitive design as ChucK? Is ChucK
more of an educational tool at this point and less of a tool for developers?
Thanks for taking the time to read. Happy audio/music making!
Stuart
On Jan 14, 2018 11:00 AM,

Hi Stuart,
I make standalone ChucK apps available regularly this way (on OSX):
1. UI made as a standalone in Max; knobs, sliders, MIDI i/o, etc… communicates via OSC to….
2. ChucK running as shell script (which may communicate stuff back to the UI, also via OSC)
3. All packaged as a single double-clickable application via Platypus (http://www.sveinbjorn.org/platypus)
I’ve had good luck with this approach, for standalone applications anyhow. Plugins are another matter… not sure if there is a Windows of Linux equivalent to Platypus, since you don’t use Mac though….
It is possible to wrap ChucK into an iOS app, though of course that is significantly more involved, and you have to construct a UI in Objective C or C++. Note that ChucK Racks uses JUCE as a C++ framework for creating plugins and so on, and we’ve used that as well; it’s very powerful, cross-platform, but is definitely more involved.
I hope this helps! I can say that I will continue to use ChucK, and know many others that do….
Dan
On Jan 14, 2018, at 1:12 PM, Stuart Roland

Hello, Folks, Can someone tell me where to find the YouAreReasonablySmartButHavingTroubleGettingStarted documentation? I'm having trouble getting past the initial steps: I've done some Perl programming but I could use maybe ... I guess if I knew exactly what I needed, then I wouldn't need it! Is the book I see advertised on the Check homepage my answer? If it is, is that book available electronically anywhere? I'm blind, so purchasing a hard copy would mean running it through OCR which would introduce pesky errors. Thanks for any tips. Best, Sheri

Check out https://github.com/spencersalazar/libchuck. I've been meaning to try it out, but haven't yet. It's exactly the kind of lib that should be embeddable in an app. I think it needs someone to create a few simple (cross-platform) examples. Joel On 01/14/2018 12:12 PM, Stuart Roland wrote:

Yes, exactly. I gave libchuck a go a while back and ran into various issues
https://github.com/heuermh/lick-ios
I was not so much flummoxed by the code itself, for me it was more Xcode
and various iOS-specific issues.
If anyone has iOS chops and is interested, I'd love to build open source
example(s) such as the above that would allow the community a stepping
stone to getting ChucK-based apps in the App Store.
michael
On Tue, Jan 16, 2018 at 10:48 AM, Joel Matthys
participants (5)
-
Daniel L. Trueman
-
Joel Matthys
-
Michael Heuer
-
Sheri W-J
-
Stuart Roland