Overtone, anyone?

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Hello all,
I find myself very attracted to live music coding, so every once in a while I try playing with Overtone https://github.com/overtone/overtone .

Frankly, it’s not that great - it definitely looks very powerful, but documentation is sparse at best. Also, Sam Aaron seems to have moved to Sonic PI - that looks like a simplified version of Overtone, but it uses Ruby and gets you a raw IDE - on the other hand, it has excellent documentation.

Anybody using it? any resources to get started effectively?

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Hi, you may try my library disclojure, it’s based on Overtone and leipzig and provides some basic stuff (few synths, drum sample loading etc.). Here is example REPL project which shows how to use it: https://gist.github.com/pjagielski/54195fa1ac9c753171bd0bbca6aa5942

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What’s not so great about it?

As I understand, both Overtone and Sonic Pi just connect to SuperCollider, so all the sound generation and sound creation capabilities are actually those of https://supercollider.github.io/

Maybe Sonic Pi comes with enhanced APIs that make it easier to use Super Collider? And overtone doesn’t?

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Your video is really nice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8YKC7Qugm8

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I understood that the sparse documentation is the problem…

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Definitely. Frankly, it looks kind of abandoned. Thee documentation project (the “book”) has an unaccepted patch for typos that dates from over one year ago… https://github.com/overtone/overtone.github.com/pull/16

Luckily, SuperCollider has excellent documentation. But it’s not easy to digest it all at once - what is Overtone and what is SuperCollider and how everything works together.

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Actually it’s the other way around. Sonic PI uses SC but offers almost no way to program it - it has a default set of sounds and that’s basically it. The ideas is that it is meant for beginners, so you do not do sound synthesis.

Overtone offers macros that build instruments, but you have the opposite problem - no library of ready made sounds to start from.

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