Week 1 lesson 2 - Loading sample packs

Learning Tidalcycles course Week 1 - mini-notation
42

Do you have to give the path like this in windows? "C:\\path\\to\\folder\\*"

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43

Superdirt only supports wav files at the moment, not aiff

44

@yaxu @ganz Iā€™m not sure thatā€™s the problem: SuperDirt loads aif files fine for me.

45

Hi Alex,

  1. I have macOS on a Macbook, so that may not the reason.

  2. @tedthetrumpet Yes. The file format doesnā€™t seem to be the reason too. I first placed both ( wav and aiff) inside my main superdirt folder inside subfolders. Both were recognized and played there. Both are ignored in the new folders described with the new path

~dirt.loadSoundFiles("/Benutzer/Axel/Musik/Samples/Pondskater/*");

comment:

WARNING: no folders found in paths: ā€˜/Benutzer/Axel/Musik/Samples/Pondskater/*ā€™
SuperDirt: listening to Tidal on port 57120

And there are folders with only wav files inside too.

46

Hang on, youā€™ve got ~dirt.loadSoundFiles twice, once without a path, and once with. Maybe that is it?

47

The one without the path is for loading the ā€˜defaultā€™ samples.

48

Yes, sorry Alex, just realised that!

49

Hey Alex, I am running a little behind you guys as I have a bunch of discrete math and other programming homework and such piling up over here. I finally sat down to try to work through your examples and I am having trouble loading your sample packā€¦ It was a bit tricky to get this all installed and I noticed when I boot super dirt I have a lot of other errors too but tidal is working even so. I am running mac os x - I derived the path from command line by pwd in the directory - any thoughts? could the other errorsā€¦ which would take up a lot of space here be contributing?

Open ended string started on line 1 of interpreted text
ERROR: syntax error, unexpected $end
in interpreted text
line 1 char 73:

~dirt.loadSoundFiles("/Users/aubrey/Desktop/tidal-club/samples-extra/*);

ERROR: Command line parse failed
-> nil

50

The odd thing about the first step is that it launches Emacs by default, and then Iā€™ve got to figure that out (Iā€™m pretty much a vi user and have used Unix/Linux for awhile).

So to clarify, we are appending ā€superdirt_startup.scdā€™ onto ā€œstatrtup.scd ā€ which replaces the SuperDirt startup line that we may have added earlier? That line was ā€SuperDirt.startā€ , not ā€œSuperDirt.startupā€. as shown above. Is that a typo?

In addition, it would be good to say what you are doing before describing all the steps (I.e append the SuperDirt startup file to the Supercollider start up file, then add a line to load the sample pack that you downloaded), but I think I get the gist of what is going on here.

I know that was kind of a weird question...just trying to help.

UPDATE : this mostly works (the samples load) but I get a :slight_smile:

Could not open UDP port 57120

So do I have an old stuck Supercollider procecss?

Thanks,
Tom K

51

Hi, I think you are just missing a matching ", i.e. ~dirt.loadSoundFiles("/Users/aubrey/Desktop/tidal-club/samples-extra/*");

52

Ah I didnā€™t know non-wavs worked @tedthetrumpet / @ganz! I made TidalCycles, but Julian Rohrhuber made SuperDirt, so there are mysteries for me there.
Iā€™m really puzzling over this problem. The files are fine (as you say, they load fine when put in the Dirt-Samples folder). The path looks fine. From the commandline, if you run /Benutzer/Axel/Musik/Samples/Pondskater/*, I guess you get the list of folders fine? I canā€™t see a reason why this wouldnā€™t work! How about if you give the full path, without the wildcard matcher, i.e. ~dirt.loadSoundFiles("/Benutzer/Axel/Musik/Samples/Pondskater/Babbit")
Perhaps there is a bug where superdirt fails to load a folder with only one subfolder in it? Thatā€™s the only thing I can think ofā€¦

53

Ha! That totally makes sense.

54

Thanks so much! I am so tired. Taking c and shell scripting this quarter and other stuff. Brain fried from all these lines of code. I am so excited to play with Tidal and try those sequencer lessons!!

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55

Sorry, I am a bit late with watching the vidoesā€¦
Wheater or not there is the line
~dirt.loadSoundFiles;
Supercollider is only loading the default files automatically
~dirt.loadSoundFiles("E:/audio_production/2020alex/*"); works only manually in my .scd file.
Itā€™s not a big issue but I wanted to mention it here.

56

Hey @yaxu,

I have no idea what I am supposed to be doing to remedy this error. Did you have a suggestion? Obviously I am going to be getting behind in this course and it is pretty frustratingā€¦

57

Perhaps under windows you have to give the path like this? "C:\\path\\to\\folder\\*" (sorry just realised my earlier suggestion of this wasnā€™t properly directed at you)

Otherwise, you could put the subfolders from the zip into the Dirt-Samples folder (from open user support directory -> downloaded-quarks -> Dirt-Samples), along with all the default samples.

58

@ganz @yaxu Aha! I think I have solved it. On my machine, this works:

~dirt.loadSoundFiles("/Users/jsimon/Dropbox/SuperCollider/lcode09/../bfsamples/*");

But this gives the error about ā€˜no foldersā€™:

~dirt.loadSoundFiles("/Users/jsimon/Dropbox/SuperCollider/lcode09/bfsamples/*");

Someone who understands file paths better than I do might be able to explain why!

59

First way has an extra level in there after lcode09. The ā€¦ normally means directory one level up

tom k

60

Thatā€™s what I thought. Which is odd, as the directory one level up from bfsamples/ is lcode09/ anyway?!? The actual path is in fact /Users/jsimon/Dropbox/SuperCollider/bfsamples/. So why the extra /../ works in this case is a mystery to me.

61

Hi Alex

Thanks-tried the first with different path formatting but this doesnā€™t work for me.

I put the samples in the Superdirt which worked fine-thanks.

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