[chuck-users] Controling Chuck - building accessible GUI

[altern]

> Finally, given that ChucK doesn't currently support the kind of work I'd
> liek to do with it very well, and if you don't mind me asking, are there
> other environments that maybe serve me better? Reaktor is out of the
> question and somehow I've never been truely thrilled by SynthEdit. One
> app in addition to C Sound I always see mentioned about Linux and
> modulars is something called the Super Collider. Is that closer to what
> I'm looking for and what are the major differences to ChucK?  I seem to
> recall Emacs being mentioned in that context, I've never gotten
> EmacsSpeak to run, although have a Ubuntu VM here.

Hi Rich and others, some more ideas after reading Veli-Pekka mail, not 
sure if this is useful for you, but there it goes ...

one of the most interesting features of supercollider is the separation 
between the sound engine (scsynth) and the language (sclang). Again they 
talk each other via OSC. This effectively means that you can control the 
scsynth from any system that can send OSC because this is that actually 
the sclang does: send OSC messages to the scsynth.

The system works as follows, first you nee to create in supercollider 
language a synthdef, this cannot be done but from supercollider language 
as far as i know. A synthdef is just a compiled crossplatform 
description of connections of UGens (Unit Generators) in the 
supercollider scsynth. Once this is compiled you can forget about 
supercollider and the scsynth can load and control that synthdef.

The scsynth control commands are quite well documented, they allow for 
pretty much anything you might want to do. Load synthdefs, change the 
connections between synthdefs, load sound files ...

This means that if you are not specially interested on sound design you 
could get a set of compiled basic synthdefs from somebody else and build 
on top of that whatever you want without needing to code a line in 
supercollider language. The synthdefs are you synth building blocks. You 
could patch then as you need via OSC and control its values.

If you wanted to go into detailed sound design then you would need to go 
into designing your own synthdefs. But there are many already done you 
might get some by asking people in the supercollider list. You just need 
the compiled file and documentation about which parameters it takes and 
which info it sends back if any. Thats all.

I use this from Python and it works fine. It seems a but weird but 
actually works really well. The scsynth sound quality is very good and 
it is really efficient CPU-wise. It is also totally cross platform.

enrike