[chuck-users] New to ChucK => couple of questions (-s) (Midi Relelated);

[Kassen]

On 7/4/07, Steve Salmon  wrote:


I'm new to programming and ChucK, but im loving it. i'm very keen to learn
> as I like making music in weird ways :)
> I have just made something i call "my crappy riff generator" (spits out
> random patterns and loops them for 8 bars, repeats process untill i heard
> something i like and i break out of the random loop kinda thing and let it
> play longer).


Welcome! That sounds like a very nice project; a infinite amount of session
musicians should eventually write a hit song ;-).



>
>
> When I try and run a ChucK file whilst abelton is open i get a "could not
> open channel/ cannot initialise audio device" type error.. (sorry i dont
> have the error specifics infront of me right now), but from what i can
> gather Abelton is in charge of the DAC when it tries to run a ck file and
> thus it whinges .


This would be under Windows, I would think? Windows soundcards have the
issue that there can normally only be one ASIO program (which would be Live
here) and many of them can only be ASIO or DX and not both at the same time.
You might get more lucky if you try to put have Live use the slower Windows
Media drivers, you could try that.

There was also some mention of a ASIO loopback driver here;

http://electro-music.com/forum/topic-18931.html

 But that might be exclusive to Reaper.

(I can't remember wether that link was posted to the list already but if
not; there is a test-build of ChucK for ASIO thanks to Philippe, seems to
work fine for everyone so far but more tests would be better)

To get around this i used the -s option when running my script (silences the
> audio) and  it sort of *runs* but ChucK seems to have zero concept of time
> once the -s option is used. Its a mess of overlapping note ons...
> everything
> happens at once and worse.


Yeah, I can imagine that getting confusing. "-s" doesn't just make ChucK
silent; more importantly it will make ChucK do everything as quickly as the
CPU allows, it's moistly usefull for rendering wave files to disk if you
don't want to wait for them or if your code won't run in real-time. It might
be interesting to have a future "no sound but realtime" mode meant for
translating user input to MIDI or programs like your own, but I think ChucK
might depend on getting a soundcard for it's realtime behaviour..



>
> Awaiting answers which point to a large white elephant sitting in the
> room.


Well, no, sorry. What you found is entirely normal for ChucK and Windows
soundcards. If you have a ASIO capable soundcard I'd sugest letting LIVE use
that and having ChucK use the build-in WM card (if there is one?). It would
get a bit expensive to try to fix this by buying a new soundcard that could
take input from several programs at the same time just for this.



NB. I dont have any midi clock setup ( i cant find how to do this in manual
> ) but chuck should still play notes in ableton like it does in chuck
> surely...


Yes, sorry to disapoint you more but right now ChucK asumes all MIDI
messages to be three bytes while MIDI clock is just one. We need a better
interface for MIDI; one that has support for things like clock and
preferably one that doesn't require one to use HEX numbers and keep the
protocol's standards at hand. I think everybody agrees on this but oither
issues were higher on the "todo list".

Not very helpfull, I fear, but at least things should be a little more clear
now?

Yours,
Kas.
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