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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

#81
post #52

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 (sma…

Sam Aaron (original dev behind Overtone) has been focused on building out Sonic Pi ( https://sonic-pi.net/ ) for a few years now and it's an amazing tool aimed at simplicity (literally aimed at ten year olds) and power (used for gigging).

>Sam Aaron (original dev behind Overtone)

Was he actually the original dev? I get that he contributed a lot to the project, but overtone isn't dead, and I don't think he was the original dev.

Re: Soul – A language and IDE for audio coding

#82
post #75

I'm excited that audio-programming-in-the-browser is becoming a thing. It means more people are likely to fall down this exquisite rabbit hole. I'm totally in this field so I'll list a few websites that let you program music in the browser, and my rough opinion on them: - http://wavepot.com/ is just built on top of Javascript. The code tends to be long since the library is pretty bare-bones right now, but it's really…

But is a browser-based audio environment ever going to have the low latency and robustness requirements for something like live performance?

Re: Soul – A language and IDE for audio coding

#83
post #75

I'm excited that audio-programming-in-the-browser is becoming a thing. It means more people are likely to fall down this exquisite rabbit hole. I'm totally in this field so I'll list a few websites that let you program music in the browser, and my rough opinion on them: - http://wavepot.com/ is just built on top of Javascript. The code tends to be long since the library is pretty bare-bones right now, but it's really…

Only checked out wavepot so far. Love their logo (it's a lil wave pot, and the wave is a tilde because it's computery) and the last half of the tracks like "on the verge".

Impressive what people are making with something so low level. Geez, cool mixture of artistic and technical skill.

Re: Soul – A language and IDE for audio coding

#84

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 (sma…

There's also ChucK http://chuck.stanford.edu/

Re: Soul – A language and IDE for audio coding

#85
post #75

I'm excited that audio-programming-in-the-browser is becoming a thing. It means more people are likely to fall down this exquisite rabbit hole. I'm totally in this field so I'll list a few websites that let you program music in the browser, and my rough opinion on them: - http://wavepot.com/ is just built on top of Javascript. The code tends to be long since the library is pretty bare-bones right now, but it's really…

And shadertoy.com where you have an Audio buffer generated before the real time rendering :)

Re: Soul – A language and IDE for audio coding

#86
post #82
post #75

I'm excited that audio-programming-in-the-browser is becoming a thing. It means more people are likely to fall down this exquisite rabbit hole. I'm totally in this field so I'll list a few websites that let you program music in the browser, and my rough opinion on them: - http://wavepot.com/ is just built on top of Javascript. The code tends to be long since the library is pretty bare-bones right now, but it's really…

But is a browser-based audio environment ever going to have the low latency and robustness requirements for something like live performance?

WASM will probably start catching up with natively-compiled C++ eventually, but we're working on the hypothesis that even natively-compiled C++ can't quite get the best performance out of audio hardware, because running it on the CPU in a normal OS is the wrong place for a realtime task like that.

Something we do want to create will be network-attached SOUL audio i/o devices which can run the code using native JIT engines. Then, Javascript in a browser can send its SOUL code to be compiled + executed directly on these bare-metal devices and get super-low latency.

Re: Soul – A language and IDE for audio coding

#87
This has been a great thread, thanks for all the comments!

One final note I'd like to add is that we've also been running a closed early-adopter group for industry insiders, where we're sharing some other non-web tools including our LLVM JIT engine and C++ generator, and discussing partnerships etc.

If you represent a company that think should join this group, ping me and let me know..

Re: Soul – A language and IDE for audio coding

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our long-term goal with plugins is to make them much easier to write in SOUL without needing to actually compile anything natively.. as for a marketplace to deliver them, we'd certainly love to be able to offer one of those, and will see how things go. Yep, we'd love to make soul.dev into a place where you can browse snippets of code, search for people's implementations of various DSP algorithms and try them out and…

> Our long-term goal with plugins is to make them much easier to write in SOUL without needing to actually compile anything natively could you offer to compile/package SOUL code into a VST as a service?

Yes, we already have a prototype C++ generator as a command-line tool, so mixing that with some boilerplate to build a plugin will be something we do soon.

And yes, the same thing would also work nicely if hosted as a web-service

Re: Soul – A language and IDE for audio coding

#89

I recall seeing Soul pop up on HN before, and at the time I was critical of it for being announced way too early (no working examples or even any indication of what the code might look like). This is much better, and it's good to see that it's actually progressing instead of being yet another case of vaporware. That said, still disappointing that there doesn't appear to be any info on an actual compiler or runtime or…

There'll actually be many ways of using it.. Javascript in a browser is just one of those ways. The real API is written in C++ and we'll be offering a C binding in many languages, which you'll use in a pretty similar way to how you'd use the openGL API to run a shader. We'll publish that C API soon-ish, hopefully within a few months.
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