SuperCollider

SuperCollider is a platform for audio synthesis and algorithmic composition, used by musicians, artists, and researchers working with sound. It consists of:

• scsynth, a real-time audio server with hundreds of unit generators ("UGens") for audio analysis, synthesis, and processing
• supernova, an alternative server to scsynth with support for parallel DSP on multi-core processors
• sclang, an interpreted programming language that controls the servers
• scide, an editing environment for sclang with an integrated help system

sclang comes with its own package manager, called Quarks. scsynth and supernova both support third-party plugins via C and C++ APIs.

SuperCollider is written in C++11 using several third-party libraries, including Qt and Boost.

Install

macOS and Windows builds for stable releases are provided at our downloads page. See the macOS README and Windows README for instructions on usage, and how to build SC yourself.

To get the latest stable version, Linux users will need to build SuperCollider themselves. See the Linux README for instructions.

Platform requirements

The minimum supported version of macOS is 10.10 Yosemite; the minimum supported version of Windows is Windows Vista.

Learn

The official docs can be viewed in the SuperCollider IDE's built-in documentation browser. You can also view them online at doc.sccode.org.

We recommend the following resources for learning SC:

• A Gentle Introduction to SuperCollider, a free ebook by Bruno Ruviaro
• Eli Fieldsteel's video tutorials
• Getting Started with SC
• Nick Collins' SC tutorial
• SCCode.org, a repository of user-submitted examples

Discuss

You can sign up for mailing lists, and view the archives for sc-users and sc-dev.

We also have a forum and a Slack chat.

Please read our adopted code of conduct, which applies to all the above communities.

Contribute

Development of SuperCollider happens here on GitHub, and we are grateful to the community for contributing bugfixes and improvements. Read below to learn how you can take part in improving SuperCollider.

Code of Conduct

Please read our adopted code of conduct before contributing, so that you can understand what actions will and will not be tolerated.

Contributing Guide

Read our contributing guide to learn about our development process, how to propose bugfixes and improvements, and how to build and test your changes.

Good First Issues

To help you get your feet wet and get you familiar with our contribution process, we have a list of good first issues that contain bugs which have a relatively limited scope. This is a great place to get started. You can also ask on our developer's mailing list, on Slack, or on the forum.

License

SuperCollider is free software available under Version 3 the GNU General Public License. See COPYING for details.