SuperDirt

SuperCollider implementation of the Dirt sampler, originally designed for the TidalCycles environment. SuperDirt is a general purpose framework for playing samples and synths, controllable over the Open Sound Control protocol, and locally from the SuperCollider language. SuperDirt is also used by Sardine, a live coding environment for Python 3.10+.

(C) 2015-2023 Julian Rohrhuber, Alex McLean and contributors

SuperDirt is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this library. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Requirements

• SuperCollider >= v3.7 (3.6 possible, but see below): https://github.com/supercollider/supercollider
• The Vowel Quark: https://github.com/supercollider-quarks/Vowel
• optional, but recommended (many effect UGens need it): sc3-plugins: https://github.com/supercollider/sc3-plugins/
• For proper usage you need https://github.com/tidalcycles/Tidal

Installation from SuperCollider

include("SuperDirt");

Note: this also automatically installs the DirtSamples quark, which contains a large collection of sound files. It downloads them as a zip file. Sometimes, git fails to unpack these samples and they don't get listed. In this case, you have to unpack them "manually".

Simple Setup

SuperDirt.start

You can pass port, outBusses, senderAddr as arguments.

Setup with options

For an example startup file, see the file superdirt_startup.scd. you can load(<path>) this from the SuperCollider startup file.

Automatic startup

If you want SuperDirt to start automatically, you can load it from the startup file. To do this, open the sc startup file (File>Open startup file) and add: load("... path to your tidal startup file ..."). This path you can get by dropping the file onto the text editor.

Options on startup

• numChannels can be set to anything your soundcard supports
• for server options, see ServerOptions helpfile: http://doc.sccode.org/Classes/ServerOptions.html

Options on-the-fly

• add sound files. ~dirt.loadSoundFiles("path/to/my/samples/*") You can drag and drop folders into the editor and add a wildcard (*) after˘ it.
• you can pass the udp port on which superdirt is listenting and the output channel offsets: ~dirt.start(port, channels)
• new orbits can be created on the fly (e.g. ~dirt.makeBusses([0, 0, 0])).
• add or edit SynthDef files to add your own synthesis methods to be called from tidal: https://github.com/musikinformatik/SuperDirt/blob/master/synths/default-synths.scd
• you can live rewrite the core synths (but take care not to break them ...): https://github.com/musikinformatik/SuperDirt/blob/master/synths/core-synths.scd

Trouble Shooting

If you run into unspecific troubles and want to quickly reset everything, you can run the following: SuperDirt.resetEverything You can minimize downtime if you have a startup file that automatically starts SuperDirt (see Automatic startup, above).

Using SuperDirt with SuperCollider 3.6

It is in principle possible to use SuperCollider 3.6, but startup will be much slower by comparison. It is not recommended if you expect it to run smoothly.

For reference, we leave here the instructions if you want to try anyway:

The install works differently: don't do include("SuperDirt"), but instead download the three quarks to the SuperCollider Extensions folder:

• https://github.com/musikinformatik/SuperDirt
• https://github.com/tidalcycles/Dirt-Samples
• https://github.com/supercollider-quarks/Vowel

Note that for automatically loading the sound files, the folder Dirt-Samples should have this name (not Dirt-Samples-master e.g.) and should be next to the SuperDirt folder.