For those wondering what it actually is, as I was:

https://sonic-pi.net/

"Sonic Pi is your free code-based music creation and performance tool."

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.

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!

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!

How does it compare to https://strudel.cc/ ?

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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.

Is there any (somewhat) known artist who uses Sonic Pi in their actual work?

Congratulations on your release, Sam!

Are you still considering hardware demos, such as those on Raspberry Pi?

If anyone here also wants to try a different syntax, check out http://glicol.org/.

I keep wanting to learn Supercollider but I never get to. Maybe I'm more enamored of the idea of live coding than actually wanting to play this way. Sonic Pi could finally convince me!

I was at a final session of Code Mesh many moons ago in London, beer in hand, Sam + Joe Armstrong on stage banging out beats with Sonic Pi - good times.

As mentioned before, the license needs to be GPL since the audio engine is clearly a derivative of SuperCollider/scsynth. I also asked the original author jmc and he is also not agreeing w/ your "network barrier" interpretation to avoid GPL.

One more thought: it might be worth checking in with people before running AI agents over their GPL code, especially in a creative coding environment.

Sonic Pi or Strudel? Which is better for a music noob?

Yesss. I have been here for years. Love to see v5 finally get released. Well done, Sam! Here's to many more years. \m/

I tried it for a few seconds but there is a huge lag between pressing a button and the sound, and half the time the button press does nothing. It's basically unusable.

The ChucK comparison holds for the language, but Sonic Pi's draw was always the live-coding loop with a beginner-friendly editor bundled in.

why is the Amen Brother breakbeat included in this software as if it's open source and GPL / MIT license? Just because something has been stolen a million times, that doesn't make it public domain, it's still under copyright and owned by its publisher, who I'm pretty certain has never given it away under a free license.

Sweet. Going to make Pi help make Pi music. Just have to vibe code some method but this will be enjoyable.

Someone needs to introduce this to an AI model. Have agents recreate music from scratch! :)

ud expect an open source / free software project to have some dignity and not link direct to patreon. times are changing.

Is it just me or does the “Pi” branding give the connotation of “underpowered, expensive and hobbyist quality”?

Suggest you drop the Pi name in your next project.