Install SuperCollider In Ubuntu Hardy Heron
SuperCollider is a music programming language that allows for realtime audio synthesis and algorithmic composition, making it popular with academic sound researchers and sound artists alike. For whatever reason it missed the boat and was excluded from Ubuntu 8.04 aka Hardy Heron. Fortunately, there are two fairly easy ways to install SuperCollider on your Ubuntu box.
The easy was is to go here and avail yourself of Artiem Popov’s(at least I think that’s his name) hard work. He has packaged SuperCollider, SuperCollider Server, the associated dev packages, and add-ons for Emacs, Vim, and Gedit to allow these editors to act as SuperCollider consoles. You can add his Launchpad PPA as an apt repository and keep current with updates as well.
The less easy way involves checking out the latest SuperCollider code using Subversion. The very easy to follow directions are here at the SuperCollider wiki. Although the instructions were written a while ago by someone using Ubuntu 7.04 the method seemed to work fine with Hardy Heron.
One piece that seems to be missing is the SwingOSC, a Java based environment that provide GUI elements that can be used in SuperCollider patches. This isn’t hard to install either, but the current version (version 0.60) may not work with some SuperCollider patches.
Now that I’ve got it installed (from source), all I’ve got to do learn how to do something interesting with SuperCollider. Wish me luck…