[chuck-users] Various general questions

[Spencer Salazar]

Hey Robin!

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 8:37 AM, Robin Haberkorn
<robin.haberkorn at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I'm relatively new to ChucK. I knew it for some time but only now I
> start using it "seriously".
> I have a couple of questions and hope that you may answer them:
>
> 1) Does ChucK have a public source repository? (This question may be
> off-topic...)

You can check out the primary development branch using SVN, like so:

svn checkout https://chuck-dev.stanford.edu/svn/chuck/trunk/ chuck

Development has been moving kind of fast lately, so things might not
totally be working/compiling on some platforms (e.g.Windows or Linux).
This will likely get cleaned up in the next week or so, now that I
have some free time to do so.

> 2) Is there a real bug tracker somewhere?
> I found the one in the wiki, but it is somewhat confusing...

ChucK has a "private" (to SVN committers only) bug tracker, which
isn't that helpful, but which actually is only a recent addition.
Having a public bug tracker is on our to-do list.

>
> 3) Is there a way to use multiple sound devices in one ChucK VM?
> I'm using chuck 1.2.1.3 on Linux-ALSA. It seems I have to specify the
> dac on the command line (--dacX). This could probably be used to start
> one VM per soundcard and exchange audio data via netout/netin. I will
> try this soon.

This is not currently possible.

> However just out of curiosity, is multiple-dac support in one VM
> anticipated some time in the future?

Yes! For Linux we haven't encountered compelling use cases other than
removing the need for two different binaries. But for Windows,
switching between ASIO and DirectSound within the same binary seems
pretty useful, so likely it will be straightforward to extend this
capability to ChucK on Linux once the Windows version has it.

>
> 4) regarding netout/netin. This may also be useful for integration with
> other applications like Pure Data. Does anyone have experience with it
> or details about the protocol if there is any? If not I will have a look
> at it as soon as I need it and write a Pure Data external if necessary.

netin/netout is something of an ignored feature at the moment -- I
sense a general interest in having working network audio xmitters, but
network communication between ChucK and other audio/programming
environments seems to be mostly confined to control-rate information,
in which case OSC is sufficient.

>
> 5) I read about an Un-Chuck operator (=<). However it appears nowhere in
> the current docs. Is it still supported, or temporarily disabled?

Un-chuck is alive and well -- I believe this would be one of many
shortcomings of the current set of documentation. You can use it to
remove a UGen from the audio graph, and ensure that that UGen is no
longer using up CPU cycles to generate/process samples.

SinOsc s => dac;
1::second => now; // sound happens
s =< dac;
1::second => now; // no sound!

>
> 6) In the "Developer Guide" I read something about OpenGL support. This
> was the only mention of OpenGL support I came across. I suppose if this
> really exists, it is a new development feature since v1.2.1.3 does not
> appear to posses any (undocumented) OpenGL API.

OpenGL support has existed in various incarnations, mostly as a result
of various student projects, but has never been released officially as
part of ChucK. How best to integrate graphics processing into ChucK is
an open issue at this point, one in which we (ChucK team) are very
interested in, but also don't necessarily know the answer to.

spencer


>
> Best regards,
> Robin Haberkorn
>
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