Good vsts and hosts for them are expensive and heavyweight. They are riddled with bloat and yagni. My end goal is to have a generic synth engine that I can hook up to MidiKeyboards, drum triggers, magical future instruments I invent, or carrier pidgeons. Preferably headless and lightweight so I can run it over ssh on a Raspberry pi!
After looking at the various musical programming laguages out there it seemed like there were four viable candidates.
Max was $$$$ and I dislike both visual "programming" and closure so Pd and Overtone were out leaving me with the scrappy, poorly documented underdog ChucK.
ChucK is garbage. It has poor documentation. It's inconsistent. It has such a bad type system it might as well not exist. Loading and managing source files and dependencies is a nightmare. It's asynchronous without a sane way to handle asyncronicity in the standard library. State is easily mismanaged.
It reminds me a lot of Javascript 🧌.
I messed around with the Flux pattern in actual JS and it seemed to handle the complexity of an event driven application pretty well. I liked how it consolidated the application state and had easily pluggable components. So I decided to try to adapt it to building a synth in the ChucK language. Unlike most of my crazy ideas I actually did it and it actually worked!
Install chuck using brew install chuck or sudo apt-get chuck or whatever whiz-bang pm you use.
Run the inialize script using chuck initialize.ck
Pretty simple!
You can also configure the input and output components using command line
Not surprisingly ChucK has wonky argument syntax. If you want to use a different input or output than the default you need to pass it when you call the initialize script.
chuck initialize.ck:output:SimpleStrings
chuck initialize.ck:input:HIDKeyboard
chuck initialize.ck:i:HIDKeyboard:o:SimpleTriangle
A complete list of input/output components can be found in the configurator
lol ChucK