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Soul – A language and IDE for audio coding

soul.dev

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Re: Soul – A language and IDE for audio coding

#41

Post by julesrms »

mleonard wrote: post #37
julesrms wrote: post #10

Hello HN - thanks for giving our website a proper stress-test! I'm the developer of SOUL - happy to answer any questions you guys have.. :)

Hi. Great talk. Basically introduced me to audio development! Given you're experience and the future you're talking about with Soul or a similar language being how audio development is done... what resources and approaches would you recommend someone completely new to the domain study?

Audio dev has always been insanely hard - that's part of the motivation behind creating this!

It's hard because you need some serious mathematical skills to understand the DSP itself (that's the bit I'm lacking in..).

Then if you're building a "real" product, you're going to have to write in C++ and have a rock-solid understanding of concurrency, real-time coding and many other very tricky subjects which take huge amounts of experience to get good at.

I've been doing this for over 20 years so have lost sight of how beginners should learn it.. But most people seem to just dive in with an idea they want to build, and start trying to swim! It can be painful to see people using JUCE/C++ who don't really have any interest in C++ for its own sake, but who are struggling to get anywhere without putting the effort in to learn the language properly.

Re: Soul – A language and IDE for audio coding

#42

Post by beckler »

julesrms wrote: post #20
ttoinou wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the reply. Suggestion for the name of the marketplace or community : "Soulfly" sounds good (and probably need to separate it from the "infrastructure" / dev project ?)

Well, we also have this URL: https://audio.dev :)

so this is gonna seem kinda weird, but I noticed y'all run the audio developers conference.

I own the domain adc.io, for a project that went nowhere years ago, so now I mostly use it for some personal things. would you guys be interested in doing a trade or want to buy it or something? I feel kinda trashy asking that here since it doesn't add to the discussion, but I like what y'all are doing, and didn't even know that conference existed until I clicked that link.

Re: Soul – A language and IDE for audio coding

#43

Post by mleonard »

julesrms wrote: post #10

Hello HN - thanks for giving our website a proper stress-test! I'm the developer of SOUL - happy to answer any questions you guys have.. :)

Hi. Quick fly-by suggestion for you: look into the language server protocol by Microsoft if you haven't already.

In the golang community for example Google has recently decided to build and officially support a language server (called 'gopls'). How it works: You build a language server once and get features like typecheck errors, auto complete, go to definition, code peaking, documentation on hover, etc... in all editors/IDEs that support the protocol.

LSP Website: https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/ Recent golang talk: https://youtu.be/bNFl7HcyDao?t=354

Re: Soul – A language and IDE for audio coding

#44

Post by julesrms »

gugagore wrote: post #39
julesrms wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our original thoughts on that was "nah, that'd be silly because GPUs are the wrong shape for audio workloads" ..however, having a few conversations with more knowledgable people has changed our mind and we're definitely going to give it a try on Metal and Vulkan to see what happens. Should be interesting.

I'm curious what you mean by "wrong shape"? Because GPUs are for for very data-parallel workloads? Or because the latency is high?

Yeah, we made both of those assumptions. But it's apparently less true of the latest generation of compute engines. We probably won't bother with CUDA, but Metal is certainly a viable platform to try. It's one of those things where nobody really knows how it'll do until you try it.

Also, we do know a few people who want to use SOUL to write audio code which does need high parallelism. It's not a super-common use-case for audio, but it does exist.

Re: Soul – A language and IDE for audio coding

#45

Post by julesrms »

reggieband wrote: post #40
julesrms wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our original thoughts on that was "nah, that'd be silly because GPUs are the wrong shape for audio workloads" ..however, having a few conversations with more knowledgable people has changed our mind and we're definitely going to give it a try on Metal and Vulkan to see what happens. Should be interesting.

I can understand the aversion to GPU (with "Graphics" being a primary point). Most ways of interfacing with the GPU use x,y,z, color, lighting wrappers around what is essentially a super powerful vpu. I also wonder how the traditional pipeline (e.g. vertex shading, fragment shading) can be repurposed for audio. I don't have any experience with Metal or Vulcan but my intuition is that audio DSP is going to include a h…

Yep.

And even for very simple audio loads, there's often unused capacity in compute cores (even when running games) which would could do the job "for free" without bothering the CPU.

Re: Soul – A language and IDE for audio coding

#46

Post by majkinetor »

Just for the sake of completeness and for those new to the topic, here are some mainstream audio programming languages people might also want to take look at:

- Csound This is one of the first ones, a little bit dated now but there is ton of material and nice books

- Pure Data (max/msp) Graphical audio language, also popular and very nice for beginners

- Supercollider Object oriented platform for audio synthesis (smalltalk)

- Overtone Functional audio synthesis platform using Clojure (totally awesome)

Re: Soul – A language and IDE for audio coding

#47

Post by mleonard »

_pmf_ wrote: post #29

There's also ChucK: https://chuck.cs.princeton.edu

Thanks. Just clicked through to the ChucK site.

For anyone interested apparently there's a free MOOC in may: https://www.kadenze.com/courses/introduction-to-programming-...

And a TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/ge_wang_the_diy_orchestra_of_the_f...

Re: Soul – A language and IDE for audio coding

#48

Post by julesrms »

mleonard wrote: post #43
julesrms wrote: post #10

Hello HN - thanks for giving our website a proper stress-test! I'm the developer of SOUL - happy to answer any questions you guys have.. :)

Hi. Quick fly-by suggestion for you: look into the language server protocol by Microsoft if you haven't already. In the golang community for example Google has recently decided to build and officially support a language server (called 'gopls'). How it works: You build a language server once and get features like typecheck errors, auto complete, go to definition, code peaking, documentation on hover, etc... in all edi…

Yeah, this is on our to-do-list!

Re: Soul – A language and IDE for audio coding

#49

Post by julesrms »

beckler wrote: post #42
julesrms wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we also have this URL: https://audio.dev :)

so this is gonna seem kinda weird, but I noticed y'all run the audio developers conference. I own the domain adc.io, for a project that went nowhere years ago, so now I mostly use it for some personal things. would you guys be interested in doing a trade or want to buy it or something? I feel kinda trashy asking that here since it doesn't add to the discussion, but I like what y'all are doing, and didn't even know th…

thanks for the offer but I think we're a bit overloaded with URLs right now!

Re: Soul – A language and IDE for audio coding

#50

Post by mleonard »

julesrms wrote: post #48
mleonard wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi. Quick fly-by suggestion for you: look into the language server protocol by Microsoft if you haven't already. In the golang community for example Google has recently decided to build and officially support a language server (called 'gopls'). How it works: You build a language server once and get features like typecheck errors, auto complete, go to definition, code peaking, documentation on hover, etc... in all edi…

Yeah, this is on our to-do-list!

Cool :)
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