attention musicians & those who enjoy unusual programming environments: i created an ebuild for the latest version of supercollider. it’s available in the overnight overlay.

to my knowledge, i’m the only developer with an ebuild for the new SC 3.5 series. that being said, the ebuild is still a work in progress. i need to clean up the help file installation & generation. there are some funny quirks as far as accessing all the HTML stuff goes if you’re using the editor plugins. that’s the other WIP: i need to add the editor plugins (scvim, sced, scel) to the install phase. and, of course, clean up the inline comments. some SC modules can be turned off, but upstream really wants them enabled. i’ve force-enabled a few dependencies for this very reason, since making them optional interferes with upstream troubleshooting, and is a headache for maintaining the ebuild.

the developer notes suggest that the optional plugins can be built independently of the main supercollider source, but it still requires downloading the entire tarball. i might split them out into separate ebuilds, so that you don’t have to rebuild all of SC to get one particular plugin. i’m not looking forward to straightening out and building Ruby for scvim (example: is it an RDEP on || gvim[ruby] vim[ruby], or just an RDEP on dev-lang/ruby?), nor all of emacs for scel, nor figuring out where the gedit plugin for sced ends up…but i gotta make sure this stuff works.

once all that is finished, i can try out some of the monome apps built with SC. i’m excited about version 3.5, since it finally includes a cross-platform Qt GUI, which (in theory) would give me access to the programs that have only worked on Mac/Win. they might need a bit of rewriting to use the generic drawing commands, though. there’s a live performance sampling program i particularly want to delve into, once it’s updated for the new GUI stuff. could be just the thing for the kinda music i want make, which has been mostly confined to loop-based production due to limitations in my live performance apps. i’d much prefer to fire off a hundred one-shot samples of varying length, rather than try to cram everything into just seven loops.