I’ve just finished uploading a new ugen for SuperCollider called DFM1. It’s a port of Tony Hardie-Bick’s DFM1 filter, which is a great sounding, overdrivable, self-oscillatable, incredibly detailed model of an analog filter. Full source code is available, so if you’ve got an interest in DSP coding it’d be an excellent example. If you just want to make some strange noise it’s pretty damn good for that as well. You can download DFM1 from here.

I made the switch from TextMate to MacVim about a month ago now and unlike my previous attempts to switch to Vim the change seems to have stuck this time. Of course once you find an editor you like there’s a desire to use it for everything you can and that meant getting scvim working. Here’s how it’s done… Download a copy of the SuperCollider source from the SourceForge page Open up Terminal and cd to supercollider_source/editors/scvim The manual install instructions in the scvim readme are good so have a quick read of that Copy the executables from the bin directory to /usr/local/bin Copy the ftplugin, syntax and indent directories to ~/.

Solving this problem has been bugging me on and off for ages now so I thought I’d share the solution I eventually came up with. First, the problem: how to do on-the-fly looping of audio in SuperCollider in sync with a sequencer? In this case the sequencer is going to be a very simple example in Processing but the method will work with a hardware drum machine as well. The trick I settled on is to think like an old hardware loop pedal.

When I first started to get into the nuts and bolts of sound generation (rather than tweaking someone else’s plugins), I did what a lot of other people do and downloaded Pure Data. It’s a great environment to start playing around in, you connect an oscillator block to a filter block to an output block and you’ve got a little subtractive synth and it’s clear how the signal flows through it.