[chuck] recording your session to file

[Ge Wang]

It's me again (sorry).

Here is a brief tutorial on writing to disk...

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1. recording your ChucK session to file is easy!

example:  you want to record the following:

     > chuck foo.ck bar.ck

all you's got to do is ChucK a shred that writes to file:

     > chuck foo.ck bar.ck rec.ck

no changes to existing files are necessary.
an example rec.ck can be found in examples/, this
guy/gal writes to "foo.wav".  edit the file to change.
if you don't want to worry about overwriting the same
file everytime, you can:

     > chuck foo.ck bar.ck rec2.ck

rec2.ck will generate a file name using the current
time.  You can change the prefix of the filename by

     "data/session" => w.autoPrefix;

w is the WvOut in the patch.

Oh yeah, you can of course chuck the rec.ck on-the-fly...

from terminal 1
     > chuck --loop

from terminal 2
     > chuck + rec.ck


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2. silent mode

you can write directly to disk without having real-time audio
by using --silent or -s

     > chuck foo.ck bar.ck rec2.ck -s

this will not synchronize to the audio card, and will generate
samples as fast as it can.


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3. start and stop

you can start and stop the writing to file by:

     1 => w.record;  // start
     0 => w.record;  // stop

as with all thing ChucKian, this can be done
sample-synchronously.


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4. another halting problem

what if I have infinite time loop, and want to terminate
the VM, will my file be written out correctly?  the answer:

Ctrl-C works just fine.

ChucK STK module keeps track of open file handles and
closes them even upon abnormal termination, like Ctrl-C.
Actually for many, Ctrl-C is the natural way to end your
ChucK session.  At any rate, this is quite ghetto, but it works.
As for seg-faults and other catastrophic events, like computer
catching on fire from ChucK exploding, the file probably is
toast.

hmmmm, toast...


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5. the silent sample sucker strikes again

as in rec.ck, one patch to write to file is:

dac => gain g => WvOut w => blackhole;

the blackhole drives the WvOut, which in turns sucks
samples from gain and then the dac.  The WvOut
can also be placed before the dac:

noise n => WvOut w => dac;

The WvOut writes to file, and also pass through the incoming samples.


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6. post your files online

    http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/wiki/


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7. I need to go to sleep.

this concludes the brief tutorial.


Best,
Ge!