"Learning Tidal" course week zero - installation and exploration

Installation help
10

Hi @yaxu,

I use a MacBook Pro with Catalina 10.15.4 and I used the automated installation. Everything looked fine, but when I try to start SuperDirt inside a SuperCollider IDE with the given instructions, I get the following:

-> nil
ERROR: Class not defined.
in interpreted text
line 1 char 9:

SuperDirt.start

The alternative with a terminal window does not work either, here I got:
-bash: sclang: command not found
in response

What can I do?

Best Moritz

11

Hi @Moritz, it seems that SuperCollider has installed, but for some reason the SuperDirt ‘quark’ (a quark is supercollider speak for a plugin or add-on) hasn’t.

Try starting SuperCollider and then running include("SuperDirt"). It will take a while as it will also install Dirt-Samples which is a lot of sound samples. Once everything is installed you’ll need to ‘recompile class library’ from the menus (or just restart supercollider, as it always does this on start up). Then hopefully SuperDirt.start will work.

12

Great, thank @yaxu, it works! Indeed ‘quark’ was missing …

1 Like
13

Hi @yaxu,
do you have an introduction how to use Atom Editor for dummies or something similar?
I never used it before and I don't understand the instructions on the "_for_the_first_time" site at all. Fully lost :wink:

Thanks Moritz

14

ha, just found the flight manual - I'll start reading :slight_smile:

15

@moritz I also just put this video up Week 1 lesson 1 - Tidal interaction
If that doesn't help, just comment there letting me know what's unclear.

1 Like
16

I’ve had tidal installed for while and have been updating the main application with cabal but forgot to update SuperDirt until I read the update guide. “Quarks.update(“SuperDirt”)” didn’t seem to do much so I used the Language->Quarks->Check for Updates which got things up to date. The video on setting up Tidal was really useful and I’ve updated my Supercollider start-up script accordingly. Using the script I can now place my own samples in a separate folder. I was previously putting all of my samples in my Dirt-Samples directory. I don’t have many of my own samples yet, but imagine that once I get going, they’ll start to build up. I’d welcome any thoughts on how to keep them organised? By song/mood/type of sound? Any suggestions would be welcomed.

2 Likes
17

Is it possible to organize samples beyond the first level of the directory? I have a separate directory for my own samples, which can then be referred to by the name of the directory the samples are in. I’m not sure what happens if you have any directory hierarchy above that?

1 Like
18

No it’s not really possible. Because it’s come from live coding practice, tidal has put fast access over hierarchical organisation. You can have multiple sample libraries though, which is kind of adds one more level of organisation. I’ll go through loading additional libraries soon, probably in the next video, and share a pack of extra samples to load for the course.

1 Like
19

Thanks @yaxu. I can see how the need to type paths on the fly is at odds with a tiered file structure so will try and keep things organised spreading samples over a couple of folders. At the moment my startup file pulls in the standard superdirt samples along with a ‘sample’ folder in my home directory (which I keep backed up).

1 Like
20

4 posts were split to a new topic: Install problems

21

Hey Alex,

Thanks a lot for the course. I have actually wanted to learn tidal for a long time now, this seems a nice moment. I really like what is possible but I have always been stuck as the setup did not work for me. I hope I can finally get tidal run on my macbook.

I tried to follow the steps on easy install thing and then started atom and I get this message :

: error:
    Ambiguous module name ‘Sound.Tidal.Context’:
      it was found in multiple packages: tidal-1.4.7 tidal-1.4.7

Also
cabal install Cabal
returns command not found.

I would love to know what is causing this and How i can fix it :slight_smile:
TIA
Rohit

22

Hi, this is a bug in haskell, if you install a library twice it gets confused. Hopefully they fix it soon.
Just before this error you should see “Loaded package environment from …” and then the path to a file. Remove this file, then run this in a terminal window: cabal install tidal --lib

Then things should be fixed.

1 Like
23

Hey Alex

Thank you for putting on the course!

I am struggling to install Tidal, when i follow the instructions no /Library/Application\ Support/SuperCollider/startup.scd file is created. There is not even a SuperCollider directory in /Library/Application\ Support/

I am trying to install it using terminal, super collider is showing up as an installed application in my applications folder, which is weird.

What am I doing wrong? Should I just create an empty SuperCollider directory in /Library/Application\ Support/ and copy over the necessary info into a scd text file?

Thanks

Tom

24

Hi Tom, which instructions are you following? I don’t think this file is a step in the install process. Are you seeing any error messages?

25

Hi Alex

I am following
https://tidalcycles.org/index.php/Installation
and
https://tidalcycles.org/index.php/Start_tidalcycles_and_superdirt_for_the_first_time
am I way off the mark in following the instructions?

Tom

26

I have worked out where I went wrong. I am not using the most up to date macOS and so do not need to follow those instructions.
now I am getting a
t>Failed to send. Is the ‘SuperDirt’ target running? Network.Socket.sendBuf: does not exist (Connection refused)

message in atom

27

Hi Tom, it looks like everything is running great in Atom there. You just need to start supercollider, and superdirt within that.

1 Like
28

Hey Alex,

Thanks for the reply. I have removed the file. But when I run the command

I get -bash: cabal: command not found. Is there something wrong with the installation?

Thanks!

29

Hm, try ~/.ghcup/bin/cabal install tidal --lib