[chuck-users] Hello and the state of ChucK question

[Harald Gutsche]

Hi chuckers,

I'm also new to chuck and this list.
I'm a hobbyist musician and software engineer.

I like chuck and it's concepts very much.
>From the docs and examples I thought it could simplify all my near
future sound programming needs, as it has all the building blocks
(buffers, sound file handling, midi, osc, network) and very nice
concepts (chuck operator, realtime), allowing me to express what I
need in a few lines.

I then tried to use it for my new project, which means I tried to
create a kind of stereo looper with recording and beat detection etc.

So I learned to use SndBuf, LiSa etc. and all the concepts in chuck.

I then read from internet sources, that saving stereo files is not implemented.
So I tried to save two single files (not nice but better than nothing).
I further experienced that a SndBuf cannot be used to record sound.
And on the other hand I couldn't create more than one (working) LiSa
objects at the time (is this right?).
So it seems I cannot record and save stereo sounds to files?

So as being a software developer myself, I tried to look into chuck's
source code and explored if I could solve some of these things.
(Note that I am experienced in other fields but totally new to sound
programming)

The basic materials for my plans are all part of chuck, e.g. it seems
STK should contain all things I need.
I then also managed to change SndBuf (in a quick and dirty way) to be
used for recording. But I didn't manage to save this as a stereo sound
file.
My main problem was that I don't really understand how multichannel
and buffers are supposed to work.
I see it is in the design at many places, but it seems to be unfinished.
It looks that there are very different implementations of UGens and
when looking at those tick functions I got a little bit confused.
Running out of free time, I had to abandon the implementation of the
project in chuck and am trying my way in pure C++ now.

> ChucK development is indeed alive and well!
> Actually a new release is nearing completion

Ge, from your comment I get some hope again...

Will the new release have changes in multichannel behaviour?
Will it be possible to save multichannel files?

When I looked last (somewhere in March), the repository had it's last
checkins at the end of 2010, so I thought development had been
stopped.
I think I found the repo in a forum post...but cannot post the address
here, because I'm at work now.

I assume there must be another repo to work with? Or don't you use a
central repo?

It is also very unclear to me, how chuck development is coordinated.
An integrated system like sourceforge would make this more easy, as
all the development is (virtually) bundled in one place. How should
external developers contribute to chuck?

Thanks for great software,
Harald