Sonic Pi Script Utilities

[ethancrawford]

Hey there @din, welcome!

I’ve realized you can import files through require. Meaning you can create functions which is huge to me.

A couple of clarifications around this:
Yes, it is potentially possible to use require. However, you need to keep in mind that Sonic Pi is not Ruby. (It is only based on-top of Ruby. We did not design it to be totally compatible - and the only ‘officially supported’ commands are those specific to the Sonic Pi DSL.
Anything you attempt beyond that may or may not work. (There are some fairly basic plain Ruby commands and operators which do work for the moment, such as commands that work with Arrays and other types of Enumerables - but compatibility with any parts of Ruby may change at any time in the future. As has been mentioned here on the forum before: ‘Let the buyer beware’ ).

Re ‘you can create functions’ - not sure exactly if you’re talking about the same thing, but it is already very possible to create functions in Sonic Pi. (See section 5.5 of the in-built tutorial in the app, also at https://sonic-pi.net/tutorial#section-5-5).

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I was wondering if anyone knows what this live_coding/utils.rb file is?

Sonic Pi allows you to load and run external files containing Ruby/Sonic Pi code. Here, Greg has manually told Sonic Pi to evaluate (run) some code he placed in his own util file. The way he calls eval and File.read is outdated however - there are already built in Sonic Pi functions for loading and running files. (See the eval_file, run_code and run_file function references in the built in ‘Lang’ section of the app’s Help panel).

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And how that pattern thing works?

That is just a custom method for notating and playing rhythms that Greg has used.
In terms of how it works - that’s a bit hard to say exactly without seeing the drums function (which I’m guessing is defined in utils.rb). The basic idea though is that the :jungle live_loop defines a pattern of drums and rests, and then loops over the pattern to either play a drum (when the pattern value is a number) and sleep, or just sleep (when the pattern value is -).
There are a bunch of posts here on the forum about various ways people have explored encoding and playing rhythms - here’s a couple of posts to start with if you’re interested:

Idea for drums management

Hello, I’m new here and I want to share with you this implementation I made to handle drums inside a Sonic Pi track, in order to understand if this can be a good solution I liked the idea I found around the web (mostly here and here) to map the beats inside an array, to emulate somehow the common grids used by real drum machines and simplify the creation of beats. I also wanted to have something that gives the possibility to manage in easy way the evolution of the beats during …

Rhythm notation for tuplets with amplitude

Hi everyone! I’m starting a generative EDM project, and I was looking for the simplest way to represent complex rhythms. This is what I found: My starting point was something I observed in @Nechoj’s work: x---x---x---x---, where each x represents a hit. I wanted to represent amplitude information, so I replaced the xs with digits 0-9: 8---6---8---6---. (A similar approach can be found in @mlange’s work — see the discussion.) My “aha” moment was when I realised that simply by factoring…

General Purpose Drumkit

Greatly inspired yesterday by @alexesc’s ace method for drum patterns, and in my quest to use SPi as a general purpose live and recording instrument I wrote a general purpose drumkit script. I’ve put this in 6/4, not to annoy you but coz that’s the track I’m working on just now. Four on the floor or boots and cats are great for sure, but c’mon there’s so many other great rhythms in the world and not just random ones ha ha This is so much easier than working out all the individual sle…

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Does anyone have any or know of any sonic pi script repos

There may be repos of people’s utility files and/or Sonic Pi music compositions spread around the internet, but there are no central listings of such things AFAIK. Here’s a few of my suggestions:

• It’s quite possible that many folks on the forum here share links to their code in their posts, so might be worth searching for keywords here like github (just not in the ‘Support, Help & Resources’ category, since you’ll get drowned in posts about GitHub issue tickets)
• GitHub is a fairly common place for people to store code, so it’s well worth searching there directly - try https://github.com/search?q=sonic+pi

Hope that all helps! It’s quite possible others might have further suggestions too.