Daniel Nouri's Old Blog

I'm now serving the SuperCollider help files. These are available as part of the SuperCollider source distribution (version 3.2) and are licensed under the GPL. Although these files are also available from SourceForge, Google doesn't seem to index them there.

You can search the documentation here:

Apparently, SuperCollider is no longer available in the official package repositories for recent versions of Debian and Ubuntu, despite the official SuperCollider download page pointing us there. The lack of a Debian package is quite annoying; besides it can easily bugger a rookie's SuperCollider experience on these systems.

So this is the Debian package that I've built using the infrastructure (namely the debian/ directory) that's already in the source distribution:

Download SuperCollider 3.2 deb package for Debian and Ubuntu

Download the .deb package and run sudo dpkg -i supercollider3.deb to install it! If you have a graphical Debian package installer like the GDebi Package installer, you can use that.

I applied two small patches:

• The first allows the Emacs Lisp contained in the distribution to be compiled on my system, with Emacs 23.
• The second deals with an issue with class library paths.

I use Emacs for pretty much everything, that's why the Emacs mode for SC works pretty well for me (although it can be quirky at times...). If you're unfamiliar with Emacs, I suggest you use the fabulous and super easy sced plugin for gedit. The steps for installing sced are a bit cumbersome, but it's totally worth it. Maybe I should try and make a Debian package of sced next.

Update: Ha! A minute after I publish this, I find out that the nice guy behind sced (sorry, I still can't figure out how to write non-ASCII characters here ;-), quite recently released SuperCollider packages for Ubuntu Hardy (which I suppose work for Debian just as well). And his packages look much better than mine. Oh well! :-)

Update: Another update. Our friend behind gedit released a Debian package for gedit. And he's written a short tutorial on how to get started. Go and read it!

I attended the SuperCollider Symposium 2007 in The Hague last week, which was fantastic. So many interesting people with their interesting projects gathered in one place! Too bad I missed out the last part of the symposium because of a cold.

Dan Stowell blogged about the symposium. There's some other cool things to discover on his page, like his Evolutionary Sound System (which he developed with SuperCollider), and him getting his hair cut.

Gregorio Garcia Karman took some nice photos at the conference.

You can learn more about SuperCollider on the SC home page and on Wikipedia. You might find these links particularly useful:

• SuperCollider on Ubuntu Linux, which describes how to install SC from subversion and how to install the sced SC editor for Linux, which you might find easier to use than the Emacs bindings.
• The ixi SuperCollider tutorial is a concise resource that will get you started quickly if you're already a programmer.
• If you speak German, there are excellent lecture notes from Hanns Rutz to get started.
• A list of tutorials on the SC wiki. Get David Cottle's book!
• And finally, my list of supercollider links.

My iPod shuffle recently broke completely, a couple of days after the warranty had expired. I'm a bit angry I had to trash it so early. Apparently, I'm not the only one having trouble with the iPod shuffle. Also, while trying to get support for my problem I've found that Apple's customer service sucks.

So, I needed to replace the iPod with something else. I noticed that they were dumping the same shuffle model that I had (first generation) at the electronics store for 30 EUR. I resisted, and went for the somewhat similar Samsung YP-U2 for 70 EUR.

And the Samsung is really nice so far:

• it has a display with very useful configuration options, unlike the shuffle,
• it has a nice equalizer with many presets, unlike the shuffle,
• it's a USB mass storage device that lets you drop your music right in, unlike the shuffle, which requires you to jump through hoops to have transfer of music working without using iTunes,
• it's got USB that you can directly plug in, no need for an adapter, like with the shuffle,
• it supports Ogg Vorbis, unlike the shuffle. Although I've kinda given up on Vorbis quite a while ago after realizing that my MP3 player back then wouldn't support it, it's nice to see that Samsung apparently cares and supports this free format.

Luke Slater's party on Second Life is starting now in the Alpha Box. He'll be playing his DJ set in less than an hour!

Big thanks to Daniel T. Chen a.k.a crimsun on #alsa (freenode) who helped me get audio capture (recording) working on the Sony Vaio VGN-FE31M on Ubuntu Edgy.

Edgy comes with ALSA 1.0.12. What you need to do is get ALSA 1.0.13 driver sources and compile them:

$ wget ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/driver/alsa-driver-1.0.13.tar.bz2
$ tar xjvf alsa-driver-1.0.13.tar.bz2
$ cd alsa-driver-1.0.13
$ ./configure --with-cards=hda-intel,usb-audio --with-oss=yes \
  --with-sequencer=yes --with-kernel=/lib/modules/`uname -r`/build \
  --with-debug=full
$ make && sudo make install-modules && sudo depmod -e

Now reboot and have sound recording working!

For turning on and off the internal mic you must run alsamixer, then in the catpure view select Line and hit space. The letters CAPTUR should appear in red above the word Line. If you want to activate the internal microphone, select Mic and hit the space bar. (Thanks to gnubien for explaining this!)

Yesterday I found an excellent tutorial for setting up Jack on Ubuntu. I read on the Jack homepage that it also runs on Mac OS X. So this might even be interesting for the I have to have a Mac because... umm, well... because types among us.

What is Jack for? It's a low-latency audio server. And it's for connecting audio and midi signals between programs. With Jack, you can have a virtual midi keyboard drive a sequencer and have the sequencer drive a synthesizer and a drum machine, for example. Actually, that's exactly the setup that this tutorial describes.

I figure I should only start up Jack when I make music. Because I listen to music with amaroK, which cannot output to Jack. I can imagine lots of my other everyday applications don't output to Jack. But that doesn't hurt. qjackctl is a tool for starting up Jack and configuring it. It comes with a status icon in the tray bar of which the background color turns red if you had a buffer overflow or underflow, which is useful for finding out which JACK settings work for you: The more performant your system and your soundcard, the less latency you can have. Latency is the time between playing a note and hearing it.

The last time I set up Jack was on a Debian box. The memories I have from the Jack installation on that box are that it took me quite a while to figure out things. Hence, I was hesitating but now I finally installed Jack on this Ubuntu box, and it was a snap.

After reading the beforementioned tutorial, seq24 finally starts to make sense to me. I tried seq24 before, but frankly, I didn't know what to do with it. Its user interface scared me away.

seq24 is a sequencer, as you might have guessed. It has a live mode that is very similar to what Ableton Live has: While your (MIDI) loops are playing (which drive other synthesizer or drum machine software -- you get the idea) you can switch between them by mouseclick. You can have the switch happen in such a way that the previously selected loop continues playing until it comes to the end after which your new loop starts. This mode of play is very nice for experimenting and finding out which of your loops sound good together.

All I need now is get into a creative mood... (waiting)

Update: The old Ubuntu Studio wiki was merged with the Community Ubuntu Documentation for Sound.

I saw Jamie Lidell yesterday for the third time in two years. What can I say? W00t! It was an amazing concert. If you don't know Jamie Lidell: he's the man. A great voice, a drooly passion for his music and a mastermind with electronical equipment, he's the best one man -- or any number of men -- band you've seen live.

After reading an interview in the local event magazine one day before the concert, where he said he's finished with electronic music and doing Jazz now, I was a bit concerned that it would be too soft and that he would forget about his roots. So much the better was it to see the puzzled faces of people who did not expect the hardcore electronical tunes, of which there were plenty.

Check out his fun videos.

Last weekend we saw James Brown in the Ahoy' in Rotterdam. It was an awesome show. Four female singers, three blowers, two guitarists, a base player, three drummers, two dancers and the Hardest Working Man in Show Business.

James is obviously not the youngest anymore (he's 73). So there was this extra singer who watched him carefully throughout the concert so he could pitch in whenever James' voice would get weak.

You can download an MP3 of the concert from this site. It was recorded in Washington D.C. in June.