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  • Hacker News
  • Is there any (somewhat) known artist who uses Sonic Pi in their actual work?
    by juliend2
  • https://m.youtube.com/@dj_dave____

    she started with Sonic Pi back in ~ 2020 but i guess she uses other stuff by now

    by luqtas
  • I remember years and years ago getting a Raspberry Pi from my father. We were going to use it for something or other, but that plan fell through, and I ended up using it to "deploy" my first programming project when I was around 12 or so, which was a home assistant that I was really proud of. I remember using Sonic Pi to come up with what I think was an excessive 30 or so different sounds and indicator tones for it, and a little startup jingle. Good times.
    by olivia-banks
  • Awesome to hear! So glad you had fun with it :-)
    by samaaron
  • I was just working on a music improv app for the MacBook trackpad [1] and tried to use Sonic Pi 4 for the backing track (muse) generator but it was too clunky to run a full fledged second GUI alongside the app and control it through OSC.

    I had to do sample retrieval, decoding, native CoreAudio logic to get acceptable latency. A programmable synth would have made my life so much easier.

    supersonic-scsynth in Pi 5 feels more fit now, it’s the first time I tried a JS frontend for a macOS app but if it lets me import this and use it so easily, it already paid its dividends.

    [1] https://lowtechguys.com/meander

    by alin23
  • This is one of my favorite software projects. I have played a bit with it a few years ago, and I often recommend others to play with it. I would love to have more musical knowledge, but even with my limited resources, I can do some cool stuff.

    Congratulations and thank you for your hard work all these years!

    by fmo91
  • This looks like a lot of fun. I wish they'd name it better though, the name makes me think it's a raspberry pi related thing. or a piece of hardware.
    by stets
  • Was thinking the same.
    by kwanbix
  • Yeah, immediately confused with Zynthian, which is a RPi-based hardware and software platform.

    https://zynthian.org/

    by tpm
  • In the defense of Sonic Pi, the first version of it and the Raspberry Pi were released in the same year. Obviously one went on to become more popular
    by Zetaphor
  • Sonic Pi was originally written for the Raspberry Pi and shipped on their OS for many years - hence the name :-)
    by samaaron
  • Since my first pi I've always been blown away by sonic pi's capacity and it's price. Surely worth the cost of the Pi itself and then some.

    It's so good I feel the rare guilt of not using it enough especially as I see myself as lifelong musically-inclined (skill level is another topic tho ...)

    Genuinely grateful to Aaron and everyone who helps keep this project going. Damn near a public good IMHO

    by fitsumbelay
  • I donate to this software because it's so much fun to play around with. My wife (of 30 years as of today) knows way more about music than I do and this is one way for me to connect a little bit with her hobby.
    by zaphar
  • Congrats on the 30 years of marriage!
    by fuklief
  • Congratulations on you anniversary! I’m so happy to hear that Sonic Pi helps you connect together with music. It makes me smile :-)

    Thanks also for your kind support.

    by samaaron
  • How does it compare to https://strudel.cc/ ?
    by hiccuphippo
  • Sonic allows you to plug straight to midi. Strudel is web based.
    by xutopia
  • The primary difference to me is that strudel's license is so restrictive that it's impossible to use on anything. This is MIT.
    by herpdyderp
  • For starters, strudel runs in the browser while Sonic Pi is a stand alone application.
    by Fervicus
  • Every time I click a HN post with the Something Pi naming convention my graybeard brain expects to see an SBC. This is something just about as interesting! I grew up on (and still use) trackers for sequencing. It might be fun to try a similar workflow in this!
    by nazgulsenpai
  • I blame Mario for ruining me until a year ago Pi was RPi or 3.142... but yeah this is nice, I have been using daws and have written my own small piano roll app because bosca ceoil vanished a couple years ago, but this is nice too.

    I think that app(bosca ceoil) is now back around among us, though I don't recall what had happened back in the day.

    by minraws
  • Oh my pi! (Same here, yesterday I came to the conclusion that I dont understand any of the front page links. Thanks for commenters clearing it up also!)
    by thenthenthen
  • The SBC in question here is the Raspberry Pi — Sonic Pi was one of the early pieces of educational that made up the RPi ecosystem, and Sam Aaron was sponsored by the Raspberry Pi Foundation to write it.
    by pdpi
  • Sonic Pi v5 is released.

    Sonic Pi is now more friendly, more accessible, more powerful and more fun.

    There's something to excite everyone - from the friendlier error messages, to the pro-audio config, to the new dynamic visuals for performance.

    Enjoy!

    by samaaron
  • if you want to attract more userbase that's probably the least meaningful copy-text someone can provide. Not only doesn't even in one sentence what sonic pi v5 is but also doesn't explain whats difference between v4 and v5 - I mean what it means more friendly/accessible/fun really?
    by pzo
  • I tried it. but the Flatpak seems to be missing some of the documentation.
    by Lapel2742
  • Congrats on the release Sam! Looking forward to checking it out. What's your favorite new feature?
    by Fervicus
  • I've been playing with it the last few weeks, great software and really fun to use. Fantastic timing. Thanks for all the hard work that went into the release.

    I'm particularly happy to see keyboard shortcut preferences in the release notes, that's been a real pain point.

    Thanking you kindly, sir.

    by specproc
  • I love Sonic Pi. I am a terrible musician but I really enjoy finding chords for a song and then putting them into a sonic pi buffer and messing around. U2 started as a cover band, right, so maybe this is a path to becoming musical someday.

    The one thing that confuses me about Sonic Pi is the buffers/editor. I always wish I could replace the UI with my own embedded editor (emacs in my case). I would then be able to manage all my songs as files. Right now I hunt for "least crowded" buffer window, comment out the code for the song or songs, and then add my new song. If I had my own embedded editor (like emacs), I could rename buffers to be songs, have an unlimited amount (rather than just ten), integrated version control, etc.

    Am I missing something simple about how others use sonic pi?

    The big breakthrough of sonic pi is representing music as a highly readable text file. I assume I don't know how to use the built in editor and buffer system because I feel a lot of friction there.

    by xrd
  • > I always wish I could replace the UI with my own embedded editor (emacs in my case)

    Consider his his older project instead? https://overtone.github.io/

    He even used to perform using emacs before he created Sonic Pi.

    by simongray