Sonic Pi x Bela

Hello all,

I’ve still on my mission to get sensors+liveinstruments+SonicPi together. Have been awol learning PureData, MIDI mapping, sensors etc. :sweat_smile:
Finally - a bela. Has anyone experimented with controllers+bela+Sonic Pi for realtime music?
The Bela IDE for PD isn’t live. C++ is live IDE but :crazy_face:
SonicPi is beautiful AND live. Bela latency is amazing.
I can’t find much on Bela in here.
Any of you v experienced folks done any experiments with this? I’m interested in alternative instruments/interaction design. Have been doing Bela tutorials but the software options so far are really for techie people.
Is there any tech reason why combo this might not work? Thanks so much.
Jules

I think @samaaron looked at Bela in the past.

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I’ve done some work with Bela - I’m pretty sure they have a working build for SuperCollider. If that’s the case, I’d run a copy of scsynth (the synthesis engine) on the bela and then try to connect to it from another local machine.

The tricky part would be getting the Erlang stuff running. bela is based on a beagle bone black board with a custom Linux kernel to help with latency stuff. The chances are it wouldn’t have an Erlang version available without compiling it, and compiling on that device is painfully slow. I’ll ask the bela team if anyone has tried it but my guess is that it’s a lot of work

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Thank you! This is a great help, esp about compiling vs real time running, also realising it’s far beyond my skills and better to try another route.

Some notes for fellow newbies. Bela has SuperCollider in the IDE, but Sonic Pi and even PureData are easier to work with for a newbie coder. I’ve been resisting Arduino because of needing to learn C++ but it looks inevitable.

I eventually got OSC handshake from SPi appearing in Bela IDE, using their C++ patch (this required setting up node). It saw a setup data test from Sonic Pi, but not the note sent.

Meanwhile the Sonic Pi log shows healthy OSC output, but the cue window doesn’t show the note value. I’ve had this issue with other OSC experiments with sensors, prob ineptitude but I can’t get further. Happy to have learned a lot meanwhile.

Another parameter is Windows/Mac. Some experiments (eg microbit) haven’t worked on Windows but have instantly worked on borrowed Mac. It’s super-useful when someone says ‘don’t go there’ for technical reasons, saves a lot of time!

Fingers x’d Bela team may get back with findings. Thanks so much!