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Sonic Pi v5
- hiccuphippo 1mo agoHow does it compare to https://strudel.cc/ https://strudel.cc/ ?
- Fervicus 1mo agoFor starters, strudel runs in the browser while Sonic Pi is a stand alone application.
- RBilsland 1mo agoWhile Sonic Pi is primarily a stand alone app Sam has recoded the sound engine to run in web assembly too. Visit https://sonic-pi.net/tau/ https://sonic-pi.net/tau/ and have a look
- herpdyderp 1mo agoThe primary difference to me is that strudel's license is so restrictive that it's impossible to use on anything. This is MIT.
- glimshe 1mo agoI think the underlying Supercollider sound engine uses the more restrictive GPL, though...
- herpdyderp 1mo agoDarn, you're right. Looks like there's still no hope here.
- samaaron 1mo agoActually v5 no longer uses SuperCollider’s scsynth engine. I completely replaced it with my own port called SuperSonic - which targets native (used in this Sonic Pi release), WASM and embedded. See https://github.com/samaaron/supersonic https://github.com/samaaron/supersonic
- glimshe 1mo agoIt seems that SuperSonic also uses GPL, no?
- samaaron 1mo agoYep, as it’s a derivative work. But I have put effort into making the interface purely network shaped so it’s possible to use it from non-gpl projects without them being considered a derivative work and triggering the gpl.
- spacechild1 1mo agoCareful! Just because you are exchanging messages via sockets does not necessarily make it a mere aggregate! Quoting the official GPL FAQ: > By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation
- samaaron 1mo agoOh that sounds like the official SuperCollider stance might be that any use of scsynth from an existing project via the network OSC API is considered an aggregate. Is this the case? I definitely don’t want to create any issues and it would be great to get some clarity here.
- fl0id 1mo agoalso keep in mind that the gnu.org want gpl to apply as widely as possible. Generally, your approach should be fine imo
- spacechild1 1mo ago
- spacechild1 1mo agoHow exactly does the license matter if you just want to make music?
- herpdyderp 1mo agoI want to embed the player into standalone video game binaries that don't require internet access to download the restrictively licensed files. I'm not looking to embed music file outputs, I want the music to remain customizable on the fly.
- fn-mote 1mo agoSeems like a pretty special use-case.
- herpdyderp 1mo agoI don't think it'd be that special if the licenses allowed it. (Meaning I believe it'd be normal already if it were possible.)
- abc42 1mo agoYou could make your video game source AGPL. Source code is hardly a differentiating factor these days so you'll lose nothing.
- kibibu 1mo agoHave you tried asking permission to do that? The authors may be open to dual-licensing
- throwaway89201 1mo agoI don't know what you mean with this. Strudel is AGPL, which is hardly "impossible to use on anything". The default sound banks are CC-by(-sa), CC0 and unspecified. The unspecified ones might indeed be a problem, but the other ones are fine. As long as you allow anyone to get the source code of any derivative work you make of the Strudel code, and you take some measures to keep the distribution of the two works somewhat separate, you're should be good. And yes, there's a lot of FUD by the FSF, but your pet projects shouldn't be encumbered by such a narrow reading of 'derivative work'.
- xutopia 1mo agoSonic allows you to plug straight to midi. Strudel is web based.
- RonovoRonove 1mo agoYesss. I have been here for years. Love to see v5 finally get released. Well done, Sam! Here's to many more years. \m/
- samaaron 1mo agoThanks for your kind support!
- uwagar 1mo agoud expect an open source / free software project to have some dignity and not link direct to patreon. times are changing.
- aimxhaisse 1mo agoDisclaimer: I use to donate to this project when I can. This project has been around for 10+ years and the author dedicated a big part of his life for it, and could not have done so without Patreon support, and to my understanding went through rough times while could easily have gone through a more classic career and make money. I don't see a lot of projects around that are as interesting as it (I recommend watching old TEDs from Sam on the topic of live-coding for the why), and a commercial approach would have killed it in the first place. So I'm more on opposite side: the level of dignity required to keep putting energy for 10+ years on a software you believe in, makes it an example to me. If Patreon is the condition for more whytheluckystiff_'s style projects, instead of the ambient slope we see around these days, I'm all for it!
- harwoodr 1mo agoFor those wondering what it actually is, as I was: https://sonic-pi.net/ https://sonic-pi.net/ "Sonic Pi is your free code-based music creation and performance tool."
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- markcerqueira 1mo agoReminds me of ChucK: https://chuck.cs.princeton.edu https://chuck.cs.princeton.edu.
- nazgulsenpai 1mo agoEvery time I click a HN post with the Something Pi naming convention my graybeard brain expects to see an SBC. This is something just about as interesting! I grew up on (and still use) trackers for sequencing. It might be fun to try a similar workflow in this!
- minraws 1mo agoI blame Mario for ruining me until a year ago Pi was RPi or 3.142... but yeah this is nice, I have been using daws and have written my own small piano roll app because bosca ceoil vanished a couple years ago, but this is nice too. I think that app(bosca ceoil) is now back around among us, though I don't recall what had happened back in the day.
- thenthenthen 1mo agoOh my pi! (Same here, yesterday I came to the conclusion that I dont understand any of the front page links. Thanks for commenters clearing it up also!)
- pdpi 1mo agoThe SBC in question here is the Raspberry Pi — Sonic Pi was one of the early pieces of educational that made up the RPi ecosystem, and Sam Aaron was sponsored by the Raspberry Pi Foundation to write it.
- strbean 1mo agoA bit confusing that `<something> Pi` developed two meanings: - `<brand/line> Pi` as a brand/line of SBCs, with Raspberry Pi being the original - `<anything> Pi` as a software package targeting Raspberry Pis or SBCs generally
- stets 1mo agoThis looks like a lot of fun. I wish they'd name it better though, the name makes me think it's a raspberry pi related thing. or a piece of hardware.
- kwanbix 1mo agoWas thinking the same.
- samaaron 1mo agoSonic Pi was originally written for the Raspberry Pi and shipped on their OS for many years - hence the name :-)
- Zetaphor 1mo agoIn the defense of Sonic Pi, the first version of it and the Raspberry Pi were released in the same year. Obviously one went on to become more popular
- samaaron 1mo agoThat’s because Sonic Pi was originally built specifically for and in collaboration with Raspberry Pi :-)
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- tpm 1mo agoYeah, immediately confused with Zynthian, which is a RPi-based hardware and software platform. https://zynthian.org/ https://zynthian.org/
- juliend2 1mo agoIs there any (somewhat) known artist who uses Sonic Pi in their actual work?
- luqtas 1mo agohttps://m.youtube.com/@dj_dave____ https://m.youtube.com/@dj_dave____ she started with Sonic Pi back in ~ 2020 but i guess she uses other stuff by now
- gizajob 1mo agowhy is the Amen Brother breakbeat included in this software as if it's open source and GPL / MIT license? Just because something has been stolen a million times, that doesn't make it public domain, it's still under copyright and owned by its publisher, who I'm pretty certain has never given it away under a free license.
- noman-land 1mo agoI'd be really curious for this particular sample to go to court because unless The Winstons have been aggressively enforcing this copyright they may have already lost it to the public domain.
- gizajob 1mo agoIt would need to be defended in court yeah, but the absence of that defence doesn't automatically make it so it falls under the GPL and can be included in MIT licensed code just because the copyright holder doesn't know about it to defend it or refuse to be part of your software. Maybe you can argue the technicality but certainly not in the spirit of open source. There would be hundreds of other breakbeats you could include and give away under your MIT license if that were the case.
- aduty 1mo agoPretty sure that aggressive defense is required for trademarks and not copyright. However it may be interesting whether or not it's still protected by copyright.
- amiga386 1mo agoThat's not how copyright works. There is no "use it or lose it". You legally retain control of licensing for copying and distribution, including derivative works (samples) for the full copyright duration. In this case, it's a music recording published in the USA between 1957 and 1972, so the copyright expires on 15 February 2067: https://library.mi.edu/musiccopyright/duration https://library.mi.edu/musiccopyright/duration There's a limit of 3 years for you to bring a copyright infringement case after a specific infringement takes place, but that doesn't stop you from bringing further cases against further infringements. You don't "lose" copyright if you fail to self-police it, as you might lose a trademark. It gets very complicated around this specific 1969 sound recording and suing for copyright infringement, because prior to 1972, sound recordings were subject to US state law (presumably Georgia as the Holly Bee Music Co. was incorporated in Atlanta?) rather than federal law. Ultimately, no samplers paid The Winstons any royalties. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break#Royalties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break#Royalties The drummer, Gregory Coleman, died homeless and penniless. Some UK DJs raised money for the bandleader, Richard Lewis Spencer, in 2015. He died in 2020. So there's probably not going to be anyone suing you for infringing the copyright on Amen, Brother, but it's not not infringement.
- glimshe 1mo agoI keep wanting to learn Supercollider but I never get to. Maybe I'm more enamored of the idea of live coding than actually wanting to play this way. Sonic Pi could finally convince me!
- gizajob 1mo agoGet Claude to come up with ideas and generate .scd files which you can launch with supercollider. Ask it to build a gui with parameters. It’s pretty good at it.
- fmo91 1mo agoThis is one of my favorite software projects. I have played a bit with it a few years ago, and I often recommend others to play with it. I would love to have more musical knowledge, but even with my limited resources, I can do some cool stuff. Congratulations and thank you for your hard work all these years!
- xrd 1mo agoI love Sonic Pi. I am a terrible musician but I really enjoy finding chords for a song and then putting them into a sonic pi buffer and messing around. U2 started as a cover band, right, so maybe this is a path to becoming musical someday. The one thing that confuses me about Sonic Pi is the buffers/editor. I always wish I could replace the UI with my own embedded editor (emacs in my case). I would then be able to manage all my songs as files. Right now I hunt for "least crowded" buffer window, comment out the code for the song or songs, and then add my new song. If I had my own embedded editor (like emacs), I could rename buffers to be songs, have an unlimited amount (rather than just ten), integrated version control, etc. Am I missing something simple about how others use sonic pi? The big breakthrough of sonic pi is representing music as a highly readable text file. I assume I don't know how to use the built in editor and buffer system because I feel a lot of friction there.
- samaaron 1mo agoIf you look in the source code you’ll find an example REPL which serves as a great minimal example of how you can build your own interface. You essentially need to spawn a process, read the session’s port numbers and then send messages via OSC over the local network loopback. This could easily done from your favourite editor of choice (e.g. Emacs).
- xrd 1mo agoHi Sam, big fan of you and your work! Does this mean I just don't understand how to use the existing UI? I'm often messing around with a bunch of chords and sounds and I quickly run out of scratch space. Does that mean I'm doing it wrong?
- samaaron 1mo agoWhat do you mean by “running out of scratch space?” Do you mean your code was too long that Sonic Pi refused to run it? If so this has been addressed in v5 with much larger buffer sizes supported. Or do you mean you ran out of buffer? In which case v5 helps again as you can now save and load all the buffers to and from a single save-file :-)
- alin23 1mo agoI was just working on a music improv app for the MacBook trackpad [1] and tried to use Sonic Pi 4 for the backing track (muse) generator but it was too clunky to run a full fledged second GUI alongside the app and control it through OSC. I had to do sample retrieval, decoding, native CoreAudio logic to get acceptable latency. A programmable synth would have made my life so much easier. supersonic-scsynth in Pi 5 feels more fit now, it’s the first time I tried a JS frontend for a macOS app but if it lets me import this and use it so easily, it already paid its dividends. [1] https://lowtechguys.com/meander https://lowtechguys.com/meander
- WithinReason 1mo agoI tried it for a few seconds but there is a huge lag between pressing a button and the sound, and half the time the button press does nothing. It's basically unusable.
- samaaron 1mo agoBy default there’s a 500ms latency as this gives all target platforms sufficient breathing space for system pauses and other work not to affect the scheduling. Multiple presses spawn multiple threads which layer over each other - unless you’re using Live Loops in which case it triggers hot code swapping. What was the code you were running? Happy to help. We also have a friendly forum to ask questions and get help: https://in-thread.sonic-pi.net https://in-thread.sonic-pi.net
- WithinReason 1mo agoThanks I appreciate the response but this is not for me. I clicked "your first note" and got a runtime error "Promise timed out after 3 seconds".
- samaaron 1mo agoSounds like a possible bug which I’d be only too happy to support you with should you open a github issue. Sorry your experience wasn’t smooth.
- oceansky 1mo agoSonic Pi or Strudel? Which is better for a music noob?
- zaphar 1mo agoI donate to this software because it's so much fun to play around with. My wife (of 30 years as of today) knows way more about music than I do and this is one way for me to connect a little bit with her hobby.
- olivia-banks 1mo agoI remember years and years ago getting a Raspberry Pi from my father. We were going to use it for something or other, but that plan fell through, and I ended up using it to "deploy" my first programming project when I was around 12 or so, which was a home assistant that I was really proud of. I remember using Sonic Pi to come up with what I think was an excessive 30 or so different sounds and indicator tones for it, and a little startup jingle. Good times.
- samaaron 1mo agoAwesome to hear! So glad you had fun with it :-)
- ironmanszombie 1mo agoSomeone needs to introduce this to an AI model. Have agents recreate music from scratch! :)
- ahmoddie 1mo agoI feel like Cursor Tab functionality would be more enjoyable to use instead of writing the code entirely from a prompt, but that's just me.
- fitsumbelay 1mo agoSince my first pi I've always been blown away by sonic pi's capacity and it's price. Surely worth the cost of the Pi itself and then some. It's so good I feel the rare guilt of not using it enough especially as I see myself as lifelong musically-inclined (skill level is another topic tho ...) Genuinely grateful to Aaron and everyone who helps keep this project going. Damn near a public good IMHO
- capital-g 1mo agoAs mentioned before, the license needs to be GPL since the audio engine is clearly a derivative of SuperCollider/scsynth. I also asked the original author jmc and he is also not agreeing w/ your "network barrier" interpretation to avoid GPL. One more thought: it might be worth checking in with people before running AI agents over their GPL code, especially in a creative coding environment.
- holsee 1mo agoI was at a final session of Code Mesh many moons ago in London, beer in hand, Sam + Joe Armstrong on stage banging out beats with Sonic Pi - good times.
- vachina 1mo agoIs it just me or does the “Pi” branding give the connotation of “underpowered, expensive and hobbyist quality”? Suggest you drop the Pi name in your next project.
- spacechild1 1mo agoYes, it's probably just you.
- razster 1mo agoSweet. Going to make Pi help make Pi music. Just have to vibe code some method but this will be enjoyable.
- chaosprint 1mo agoCongratulations on your release, Sam! Are you still considering hardware demos, such as those on Raspberry Pi? If anyone here also wants to try a different syntax, check out http://glicol.org/ http://glicol.org/.
- samaaron 1mo agoYes, SuperSonic (the new internal synth and IO engine) specifically targets embedded devices, so expect some fun announcements in the future!
- sage981 1mo agoThe ChucK comparison holds for the language, but Sonic Pi's draw was always the live-coding loop with a beginner-friendly editor bundled in.
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- samaaron 1mo agoSonic Pi v5 is released. Sonic Pi is now more friendly, more accessible, more powerful and more fun. There's something to excite everyone - from the friendlier error messages, to the pro-audio config, to the new dynamic visuals for performance. Enjoy!
- Fervicus 1mo agoCongrats on the release Sam! Looking forward to checking it out. What's your favorite new feature?
- samaaron 1mo agoI love the new Link Audio which lets you stream and receive audio on the local network with any other Link Audio capable software such as Ableton Live. I also like the new QuickStart Cards as a way to get started that doesn’t require reading the built-in tutorial.
- specproc 1mo agoI've been playing with it the last few weeks, great software and really fun to use. Fantastic timing. Thanks for all the hard work that went into the release. I'm particularly happy to see keyboard shortcut preferences in the release notes, that's been a real pain point. Thanking you kindly, sir.
- pzo 1mo agoif you want to attract more userbase that's probably the least meaningful copy-text someone can provide. Not only doesn't even in one sentence what sonic pi v5 is but also doesn't explain whats difference between v4 and v5 - I mean what it means more friendly/accessible/fun really?
- samaaron 1mo agoNot sure if it’s possible to explain this in one sentence - I was just explaining the goals. As a summary - friendly as in better autocomplete, better error messages. There are vast accessibility improvements for those with low vision and those that use screen readers. It’s more fun for many reasons but stand out ones are support for game controller input, interactive docs and low-friction QuickStart cards. The post linked goes into more detail and the release notes go even further: https://github.com/sonic-pi-net/sonic-pi/releases/tag/v5.0.0 https://github.com/sonic-pi-net/sonic-pi/releases/tag/v5.0.0