What is SuperCollider?
Contents
What is SuperCollider?¶
SuperCollider is a free and open programming environment for sound development. It can run on Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, Raspberry Pi and much more.
SuperCollider contains different sub-projects of which the most important are
scsynth - an audio engine which will output sound. supernova is an alternative implementation of the server which allows for multithreading.
sclang - a programming language which we will use to control the output of the server
scide - a Qt IDE which allows us to program sclang and control the server
This splitting of components may seem strange at first but allow us to use SuperCollider in a variety of ways, like on a server in an internet.
Why SuperCollider?¶
Starting SuperCollider¶
After installing SuperCollider you want to start scide which is often synonymous with SuperCollider on most operating systems.
After starting the IDE you will see something like
*** Welcome to SuperCollider 3.11.2. *** For help press Cmd-D.
in the Post window, which indicates that sclang was started successfully and we can now start programming SuperCollider via sclang.
The document you see allows us to enter sclang statements that we can run in the interpreter of sclang.