Hyasynth

Table of Contents

Quick Start

Dependencies

Hyasynth requires SuperCollider to be installed (and for now, running). You can download the appropriate binary for your system at the SuperCollider downloads page.

The rest of the dependencies will be automatically installed by the make targets. The make target that installs the deps can, of course, be called directly:

$ make deps

Installation

Installing Hyasynth is as simple as a git clone:

$ git clone https://github.com/oubiwann/hyasynth.git
$ cd hyasynth

The rest of this document assumes that you are in the hyasynth directory.

Running Hyasynth

To get Hyasynth up and running quickly, simply do this:

$ make shell

This will create a virtualenv for you, compile things, install dependencies, etc. If, in the future, you'd like to not check for deps, you can just do this:

$ make shell-nodeps

After the setup steps complete, you will be logged into the Hyasynth shell and greeted with a banner like the following:

:>
: Welcome to
:  _  _                       _   _
: | || |_  _ __ _ ____  _ _ _| |_| |_
: | __ | || / _` (_-< || | ' \  _| ' \
: |_||_|\_, \__,_/__/\_, |_||_\__|_||_|
:       |__/         |__/
:
: You have logged onto a Hyasynth Server; you are currently at a Hy
: command prompt. Hy is a Lisp dialect of Python of which you can
: learn more about here:
:   https://github.com/hylang/hy
: Information on Hyasynth is available here:
:   http://github.com/oubiwann/hyasynth
:
: Type '(ls)' or '(dir)' to see the objects in the current namespace.
: Use (help ...) to get API docs for available objects.
:
: Enjoy!
:
:>

You can check the status of your running SuperCollider server with the commend:

:> (status)
{'status': {'synths': 0, 'groups': 1, 'peak cpu': 0.06004318222403526,
'average cpu': 0.02159080281853676, 'loaded synths': 0,
'nominal sample rate': 7.17291259765625, 'unit generators': 0,
'actual sample rate': 0.0}}

If you haven't started the SuperCollider server, then you'll get a message like this:

:> (status)
{'status': 'connection refused'}

About Results in the REPL

Hyasynth is built on top of Twisted (this is how you can SSH into it!) and the client communications with the SuperCollider server all happen via Twisted. This also means that the results are often what are called "deferreds" (see the Twisted docs on deferreds for more information).

Hyasynth works hard to hide this from the user, but if you want to manipulate returned data, you need to know about it :-) Most of the times, you'll just need to know how to get a hold of the returned data. For that, you will need to access the result attribute of the returned deferred.

For instance, if you wanted to pretty-print the results of the (status) call, you'd do this:

:> (setv s (status))
:> (pprint s.result)
{'status': {'actual sample rate': 0.0,
            'average cpu': 0.022847207263112068,
            'groups': 1,
            'loaded synths': 0,
            'nominal sample rate': 7.17291259765625,
            'peak cpu': 0.0575711727142334,
            'synths': 0,
            'unit generators': 0}}
:>

About twistd

Behind the scenes, Hyasynth is an SSH server running Hy (Python Lisp; see HydeyHole). If you look at the Makefile, you'll see that we're calling an executable called twistd. This is the Twisted command-line utility for running servers, etc. Hyasynth provides a Twisted plugin that runs all the necessary services. If you'd like to interact with this plugin directly, you can do so on the command line:

$ . .venv/bin/activate
(.venv) $ twistd hyasynth --help
Usage: twistd [options] hyasynth [options]
Options:
  -s, --super-collider-port=  The SuperCollider port number. [default: 57110]
      --version               Display Twisted version and exit.
      --help                  Display this help and exit.
Commands:
    keygen      Generate ssh keys for the server
    shell       Login to the server
    stop        Stop the server

As Hyasynth gets more features, we will update the Twisted plugin to offer more command-line configuration options, and you will see those when you run the plugin with the --help flag.

API Layout

The current API calls that are implemented:

Hy Shell
--------
 * app
 * banner
 * clear
 * dir
 * help
 * ls
 * quit

SuperCollider Server
--------------------
 * boot-internal-server
 * connect-external-server
 * connect-internal-server
 * kill-server
 * send
 * status / server-status

Miscellany and Helpers
----------------------
 * config
 * os
 * pprint
 * sys

Architecture

The current architecture of Hyasynth is captured in this image: