I am due for a new machine, and seriously contemplating a non-apple device for the first time in … well, too long.
Is there any real difference between sonic pi across osx / windows / linux?
Any gotchas on one or the other?
I know Windows releases can lag a little, and assume that Windows is a little bit of the odd one out, but anything else?
Hi,
I can tell you about my linuxian experience. Unfortunately, there is no recent port of Sonic-Pi under linux (there is a debian package but it is obsolete). It is probably possible to install it via sources but for now I have not been able to do it. There is talk of a Snap version, which would be a good solution but it seems to trample.
There I am on a laptop with Windows 10, the latest version of Sonic-Pi is installed and working properly for the beginner I am.
I go back to linux dice that I recovered my machine down and I will make sure to install Sonic on it (with a little help on the forum I should get out).
Good luck and good discovery.
Timing of MIDI and OSC messages in Windows is unusably jittery Is it possible to control via Sonic Pi an instrument in Ableton?
I haven’t tried much in way of MIDI and OSC on Windows 10, but I’ve never had any major issues. I’ve received OSC from TouchOSC without problems and sent MIDI to a software synth on the same machine as well. Granted, I had to install LoopMIDI and do some tricks to get rid of the microsoft wavetable deal.
Jittery MIDI and OSC messages are definitely a bug.
Sadly the author of the code which drives the timing of this, Joe Armstrong, recently died. I’m sure he would have loved to get to the bottom of it and make it much tighter.
In lieu of Joe, I will treat it as a priority in the near future. First, I want. to get on top of the releases, and ship v3.2. After that I can then start focussing on improvements like this.
If you (or anyone else) are able to construct some sort of testing harness to provide some hard numbers to demonstrate the level of jitter (which we can then use to compare across operating systems and subsequently new versions) that would be amazing 
@samaaron let me see what I can come up with
I’m a long time Linuxian, and the only single important piece of audio/midi software I truly miss is SPi. Yes, it is possible to get it running on a Debian based system, but so far I have been unable to achieve success. I have an old Windows machine that I run Sonic Pi on but it is subjectively ‘laggy’ and I rarely use it now. On the wider topic, given a choice and sufficient resources, I would either buy a bona fide OSX machine, or a powerful Windows machine and run a Hackintosh.
2c.
@samaaron hope this helps https://github.com/IanHalbwachs/midi-jitter-debug
Useful, thanks. Could you let me know your jitter results on your machine?
I have a PR for a build-ubuntu-disco-app that reliably builds 3.2.0-dev on Ubuntu 19.04 now, including most recent versions of all dependencies:
These are on the latest Windows 10 via loopMIDI virtual cable:
Reaper:
total events: 503
intervals (ms):
98: 8
99: 122
100: 243
101: 123
102: 7
Sonic Pi:
total events: 590
intervals (ms):
0: 1
2: 3
3: 4
4: 4
5: 1
11: 1
12: 1
23: 1
40: 1
43: 1
47: 1
50: 1
54: 1
62: 2
65: 4
68: 1
69: 1
70: 1
72: 1
74: 1
76: 1
81: 1
83: 3
86: 1
87: 4
88: 4
89: 3
90: 2
91: 5
92: 14
93: 65
94: 69
95: 46
96: 10
97: 26
98: 33
99: 21
100: 10
101: 21
102: 38
103: 33
104: 12
105: 3
106: 1
107: 4
108: 2
109: 5
110: 10
111: 17
112: 37
113: 25
114: 2
115: 2
116: 1
118: 1
122: 1
124: 2
127: 1
132: 1
135: 1
141: 1
156: 1
159: 1
160: 1
162: 2
177: 1
190: 1
195: 1
201: 1
213: 1
217: 1
219: 1
220: 1
222: 1
227: 1
232: 1
261: 1
266: 1
307: 1
Some of the SP numbers indicate that the debugger has limitations of its own, but…