SuperCollider linux standalones

There isn’t a program for playing sound files in Linux which has the functionality that I want: fast, light, play files with any number of channels and 32bit floating-point encoded aiffs or wavs, so I decided to just code my own file player in SuperCollider. I didn’t want to have to start up SuperCollder to use the file player, I was in need of a “standalone”. Standalone is concept from OSX, which is not really use much in Linux. On OSX apps are just a folder with all the files and data inside (except some configuration files in ~/Library) while in Linux apps are usually installed system wide. Since the introduction in SuperCollider of the language configuration system via a yaml file, it’s possible to override which paths get searched for class files, and so kind of emulate standalones in linux too.

A SuperCollider standalone can then be created using the language config file, with the caveat that it has to be generated from a script in order to determine the location of the home folder, in order to disable loading the default extensions folder and class library folder. I have pushed a demo of this to github.

For quick scripts I just place

#!/usr/local/bin/sclang -l/home/miguel/bin/langconf.yaml

on top of the file and either run it from terminal or create a .desktop file for it:

So now I have a file player app ! 🙂

Tags | supercollider