Sonic Pi 4.3 installer for Ubuntu 22.04

Support, Help & Resources
1

I’ve produced an installer for Sonic Pi 4.3 for Ubuntu 22.04 (the latest LTS version).
Please view the video in the link before trying it. There are a couple of issues which it highlights. Note this is unlikely to work with other linux. It contains compiled files specific to this distribution. It MAY work on other flavours of ubuntu based on 22.04 and possibly on 22.1 but I haven’t tried it.

tinyurl.com/35t3yvpf

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2

Hello! Great job! It should be available
here: Releases · sonic-pi-net/sonic-pi · GitHub

In addition the current version available in ubuntu software manager, and apt package doesn’t work on ubuntu 22

So again thank you!

3

Glad you like it. The reason it is not on the github site is that officially we only support the version for the Raspberry Pi on Linux. tweaks to develop and package for other linux flavours cannot be supported fully because there aren’t sufficient resources available to do so.
All the 4.3 version for Ubuntu is is a build from source on a virtual Ubuntu 22.04 machine, with the resulting code which is all contained in a relocatable folder packaged as a non standard binary only .deb file which also contains a list of the extra packages which need to be installed for it to run. It also has a .desktop file so that it will appear in the gui as an installed app icon. It is installed in /opt/sonic-pi, and not as a regular ubuntu package, and I cannot guarantee to give support for it.

4

Thank you for your explanation!

I think one day it would really be great to support one of the main desktop distribution like Ubuntu or Debian. But I suppose for now it’s not the majority of sonic pi users =)

5

I’ve successfully installed your deb package with “sudo dpkg -i sonic-pi_4.3.0_1_ubuntu22.04.amd64
.deb” without any issue. The splash screen appears when the application is launched. Many thanks for your package.

6

The splash screen usually appears on the first launch after starting the computer but will probably not on subsequent launches until the computer is rebooted. The cause is known but not yet fixed. This affects other Linux installs too.

7

Installed on KDE Plasma and Linux Mint Mate without problems, Thank you very much

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Thanks that works well right out of the box on my recent Ubuntu 22.40 install!
One strange side effect though. After running sonic-pi I can hear my audio echoed. This affects all audio and for instance is very distracting when using google meet. The only way to fix that’s worked for me is removing pulseaudio and reinstalling it, which also uninstalls sonic pi. Is this a setting that sonic pi affects and is there a way to undo it with the command line, or maybe a config file in sonic pi?

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Hmm. Not come across this problem on Ubuntu, but I’m only using a virtual build running on my Mac. SP uses jack to connect, but funnels this through to pulseaudio using a jack to pulseaudio link from Supercollider. This is provided by the pulseaudio-module-jack package.
It should just behave as any other pulseaudio input. If you install and run pavucontrol (The pulse audio volume control) you can see it listed as the input JACK source (Jack_to_PulseAudio). The JACK source should disappear when Sonic Pi is quit. Alternatively you could try using an independent usb soundcard and start that configured in qjackctl (which you can also install as a package if it is not there, and then start sonic pi and connect it directly to that card, rather than using its automatic connection via pulseaudio, leaving your pulse audio working independently of SP. Of course in that case you would have to use a different audio output for remaining sources eg Google Meet. Video conference software needs to grab and use audio and visual inputs and it may be that there is an interaction with it which is causing your echo?

If you want to raise and discuss this further I suggest you do it on the sonic pi github site as an issue. You may get better response there.

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Additionally, it might make sense to chat with people in the pulseaudio community as they are much more likely to have direct experience of configuring and working audio on linux. Once the audio leaves jack, it’s very much in the domain of linux audio which has a myriad of different ways of working with it depending on distribution and configuration.

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11

If Sonic Pi was better supported on Linux, it would be more popular on Linux. I can’t tell you by how much though. I installed Ubuntu just to have a stable version of Sonic Pi on my notebook.

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I have instructions on how to build on Arch based systems here: Linux build failing with "undefined reference to `wl_proxy_marshal_flags'" · Issue #3063 · sonic-pi-net/sonic-pi · GitHub

But it’s much more convenient to use the Flatpak version. Ever since the Flatpak version works with MIDI and OSC and exposes multichannel audio I didn’t bother compiling myself anymore. I use it on Arch, Endeavour OS and Ubuntu without issues.

Only reason to build it myself would be to try out some feature that’s still in development.

13

THANKS!!!
installed on ubuntu 22.04 works like in the video!

14

Hi there… Sorry for being late to the party…

This version doesn’t seem to work on my Ubuntu machine… Guess I’ll have to revert back to the older 3.3.1 package…

Maybe it’s something I did… Tried to install the latest flatpack version before trying this one, but that didn’t work. When unintalling it, the discover app store stalled at zero percent, so I forced it to quit, and started the install for this one… Maybe that’s what messes things up for this package?

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You may have seen that version 4.5 has just been released for sonic pi so far for Mac and Windows PC. I am currently working on a binary deb for raspberry pi for their latest OS which has just been released based on Debian 12 (bookworm) This has now moved over to using pulse and also wayland. I have built a version based on Qt6 which is working and I have a binary package for this undergoing tests. I also have it running on Debian 12.
I hope to look again at Ubuntu once this is finished but I only have a rather old machine which can support amd64 based versions as my main machine is m2 based mac.

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We unfortunately don’t have the resources to support the many variations of Linux distributions and hope that package maintainers will stand up to support their distro like @robin.newman is doing for Raspberry Pi OS (thanks Robin).

Until there is a package maintainer for your distro, you can build a release yourself with these instructions:

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17

Thanks for your efforts! I’ll check the upcoming versions

18

I just built successfully on Debian.
Elixir needs manual upgrading and old installations need to be removed, after that it went smoothly.

19

Hm. On latest Debian Bookworm and latest RPi OS you can build sp 4.5 with supplied packages for erlang and elixir.

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My main PC has a relatively clean system, I’ll try it there later. The system on this laptop has been bloating since 2015. There is a bunch of stuff that apt doesn’t autoremove any more.