Sonic Pi
85 points by Bluestein 5 days ago | 14 comments

lawik 12 minutes ago
Love Sonic Pi. I can't make music but watching someone who can is fantastic. We had Sam (the creator of Sonic Pi) on stage at Goatmire Elixir and it was glorious. This year he comes back with a free 4 hour workshop, a talk and a DJ set at the end. It is going to be a blast.

Can't wait to hear his stuff in a venue where people are actually primed to move. Something very satisfying about code turning into music live.

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jyrkesh 2 hours ago
First few lines of the tutorial linked above the fold:

> Welcome to Sonic Pi. Hopefully you’re as excited to get started making your own sounds as I am to show you. It’s going to be a really fun ride where you’ll learn all about music, synthesis, programming, composition, performance and more.

> But wait, how rude of me! Let me introduce myself - I’m Sam Aaron - the chap that created Sonic Pi. You can find me at @samaaron on Twitter and I’d be more than happy to say hello to you. You might also be interested in finding out more about my Live Coding Performances where I code with Sonic Pi live in front of audiences.

> If you have any thoughts, or ideas for improving Sonic Pi - please pass them on - feedback is so helpful. You never know, your idea might be the next big feature!

In an older age, I might have thought this overly flowery or indulgent, but it's SO refreshing to see technical prose that's so clearly written by a real human with an individualized voice, tone, writing style, etc. I'm by no means anti-LLM, but I'm becoming incredibly fatigued at seeing the same style of marketing speak as the intro text to nearly all the new software I come across. Kudos to being a human and injecting your voice into an increasingly impersonal space.

The rest of the tutorial that I read below that doesn't disappoint, I intend to run through it despite my not so Copious Spare Time. I've really been looking to get into programmed music and this seems as good as a time and tool as any.

Cheers!

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saghm 2 hours ago
I can't say I agree with this is take; it's never occurred to me "how rude of this author of the tutorial not to plug their Twitter handle before teaching me the thing I came for". I have no reason to suspect this is from an LLM (I don't have much confidence in my ability to spot anything other than the most obvious examples) but I also don't see any reason to assume that someone couldn't just say something like "add an introduction paragraph plugging my Twitter and live performances in a friendly voice" and get something like this pretty quickly.
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markkitti 5 hours ago
If you are interested in a live demo / performance, see minute 7:13 from JuliaCon 2024 / PyData Eindhoven 2024:

https://youtu.be/g1Jsk3p_9O0?t=433&is=fXBtVdS6R178V7Lm

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NDlurker 4 hours ago
This is a great performance https://youtu.be/G1m0aX9Lpts
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y1n0 3 hours ago
Sonic Pi was done in clojure once upon a time. Looks like ruby now?
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riffraff 16 minutes ago
It's been ruby for a long time.

I recall at some point the author started working on yet another version which used its own language instead of a ruby DSL but I don't know what happened with that

https://www.patreon.com/samaaron/posts/announcing-sonic-1126...

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suprjami 4 hours ago
So this is like OpenSCAD (code-based 3D modelling) but for music?
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roflmaostc 6 hours ago
I always wanted to test it out but it's really hard to get it run under Linux (e.g. Arch Linux) even though it runs fine on a Raspberry Pi
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Zetaphor 5 hours ago
Hard in what way? Just install the Flatpak?

https://flathub.org/en/apps/net.sonic_pi.SonicPi

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lawn 50 minutes ago
I used to have this issue as the package in AUR had some issues but they should be resolved now?
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kuil009 6 hours ago
I've seen this software before. I'd like to know what caught your attention about it again.
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riffraff 14 minutes ago
V5 seems to have been released about a month ago.
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