LiveCore

A hardcore livecoding system for realtime audio synth in the spirit of Sound Garden. WIP with Work with the garage door up ethos.

Influences

• clive
• Extempore
• Sound Garden 1 & 2
• Ad Libitum
• Strudel

Dependencies

• Nim 1.9.1 (86a6c90c9e23f2e79d9d43927e114eedec0c230d)
• fswatch 1.17.1
• libsndfile 1.1.0
• liblo 0.31

On macOS:

$ brew install fswatch libsndfile liblo
or
$ port install fswatch libsndfile liblo

For Nim try choosenim. You'll need to use devel version as the latest stable at the time of writing (1.6.10) had a GC bug crashing LiveCore.

There is also shell.nix for Nix users but bear in mind that at the time of writing it's installing a version with GC bug (1.6.8).

Configuration

Sample rate and channels count is hardcoded to 48000 and 2 respectively. If your device requires different values, edit src/dsp/frame.nim.

Session workflow

NB: you need to run all the mentioned scripts from the repo root.

• Checkout starting point. For a fresh session the main branch is a good choice.
• Make sure that the git tree is clean, as this script will be committing your changes as you make them.
• Start server with ./start-server
• Run ./start-session with a session name as an argument. It must be valid as a part of git branch name as the script will prefix it with session/ and checkout this branch.
• If the session with such name exists it will be resumed.
• Make changes in src/session.nim and save file to compile and send to the server.
• After every successful compilation there will be a commit.
• Ctrl-C this script to stop and switch back to the starting point.
• The system is ready for the next session!

Render

To render a specific session duration in a non-interactive mode to a file:

$ ./render <duration in seconds> <path/to/output.wav>

Examples

Peek into src/session.nim in session/* branches.

License

This project is licensed under BSD-3-Clause, with the exception of derivative work that is covered either by licenses defined via LICENSE files in the corresponding sub-directories or via comments directly in the source code files.

FAQ

Why Nim?

C-like freedom, performance and fast compilation with heaps of syntactic sugar. clive very much aligns with the vision I wanted to implement and I'd just port clive to macOS if only C was terser. When I'm jamming I want the code to be clean, concise and close to my intention, all other necessary trade-offs considered.

Does it run on Windows/Linux?

Maybe. Please try and let me know! I strive to write the code in a platform-independent way but I test it only on macOS.

Why snake_case procs and vars?

Purely irrational, æsthetic choice. CamelCase seems to be prevalent in the Nim ecosystem, and majority of the code I write/read in other languages is camelCase too. However, I enjoy the most writing/reading OCaml and Rust in the regard of that particular convention, and I'm glad that Nim's compiler doesn't actually care, so I went with underscores.