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Sonic Pi v5

185 pointsby samaaronlast Friday at 10:26 AM50 commentsview on HN

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harwoodrtoday at 4:53 PM

For those wondering what it actually is, as I was:

https://sonic-pi.net/

"Sonic Pi is your free code-based music creation and performance tool."

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xrdtoday at 6:42 PM

I 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.

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nazgulsenpaitoday at 5:00 PM

Every 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!

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samaaronlast Friday at 10:26 AM

Sonic 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!

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hiccuphippotoday at 5:03 PM

How does it compare to https://strudel.cc/ ?

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stetstoday at 5:01 PM

This 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.

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oceanskytoday at 7:39 PM

Sonic Pi or Strudel? Which is better for a music noob?

alin23today at 7:07 PM

I 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

fmo91today at 6:33 PM

This 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!

glimshetoday at 5:46 PM

I 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!

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WithinReasontoday at 7:24 PM

I 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.

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gizajobtoday at 5:10 PM

why 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.

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juliend2today at 5:09 PM

Is there any (somewhat) known artist who uses Sonic Pi in their actual work?

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