Any chance of a flatpak (or some form of Linux Binary) for this? I've been wanting to play around with Music Programming for ages, but none of the options I looked at play well with Ubuntu. SonicPi in particular didn't run no matter what I did, I had to dualboot into Windows to get it working :'(
Supercollider, faust, chuck, csound, pure data, common music, common lisp music, and nyquist all work on Linux. Most of the open source music programming languages make Linux a high priority!
I would recommend supercollider because it’s UI components also translate well from Mac to Linux - I created a single app with a nice UI in supercollider and it worked seamlessly on both Linux and Mac.
Admittedly I haven’t used any other sound programming language, so my opinion is heavily biased ;-)
Pure Data's UI works identically on all platforms. The others I mentioned are text languages.
If you've never used anything other than SC, it's well worth learning some others. Different paradigms make different things easier, and thus affect what you are most likely to do with them.
Personally, my axe of choice these days is running text languages from within the patchers, such as Csound in Max or PD.
> Different paradigms make different things easier, and thus affect what you are most likely to do with them.
100% this - strangely I just discovered that very thing by taking Node-RED and porting it to Erlang[1]. In doing that, I realised that Erlang has concepts (supervisor, gen_server, gen_statem,...) that would be very applicable to Node-RED and that could be reverse "ported" to the NodeJS based Node-RED. Might do that but the way NodeJS works, it might be more difficult.
The reason I thought Erlang would be a good fit for flow based programming are the independence of processes and their communication via messages. This is the exact same thing that happens in flow based programming, so Node-RED should fit well - I thought.
> Pure Data's UI works identically on all platforms.
How weird - PDs UI is exactly the same as Node-RED only built in the 1990s! The idea of flow-based visual programming is what Node-RED is about. It would be interesting to investigate the granularity of nodes in PD versus NR.
> Pure Data (or just "Pd") is an open source visual programming language for multimedia.
Have there been any efforts to transport those ideas for other applications? E.g., has anyone created a website with PD?
Perhaps you should try installing kxstudio, it is a collection of packages and all the configuration stuff for tuning Ubuntu or Debian for audio work. I have never used it but many seem to swear by it and I believe it takes care of setting up and configuring any of the common synthesis DSLs like SC, pd and Csound. Perhaps someone else can fill in the massive gaps I left.
I couldn't get super collider to work, but I'm getting the impression that something may just be wrong with my install based on the replies I've gotten.
Weirdly I've not had luck with Super collider. But I might have just fucked up my audio config at some point. It seems like other people aren't having my issues.
Give a distro with up-to-date Pipewire/Wireplumber + pipewire-jack packages a spin.
Most rolling release distros will have the latest Pipewire. Ubuntu freezes packages for months to years depending on the release you're using and you really want the latest Pipewire for a good experience.
