Linux installation

Required Prerequisites

There's a few things to install as part of a complete tidal system:

• Haskell Platform - the 'full' version is strongly recommended.
• Atom Editor (if you don't like the atom editor for some reason, please check out the list of alternatives)
• SuperCollider (pick the latest version)
• Git

Hopefully your Linux distribution makes the pre-requisites easily available to you via a package manager. For example, if you are using recent version of Ubuntu or similar, you can install haskell with the following command in a terminal window:

sudo apt-get install build-essential cabal-install git

It should be possible to install supercollider via this method too, via

supercollider sc3-plugins

. However this generally doesn't work. Either the supercollider version is too old (superdirt needs at least version 3.7), or the version of supercollider is mismatched with sc3-plugins. If you're using ubuntu, mint or a similar distribution, my advice is to ignore the supercollider packages and just compile them yourself. These scripts make it super easy to do so:

 https://github.com/lvm/build-supercollider

Just paste in the four commandline instructions under "How to?" in turn (you can ignore the bit about 'the debian way')

Optional Prerequisites

The following is optional, but recommended:

• SC3 Plugins - you may need the SuperCollider sc3-plugins if you want to use any of the synths included in SuperDirt. Most of the examples in the documentation will still work, so you could skip this step and return to it later.

Install TidalCycles

Open a Terminal. If you’re unsure how to open a terminal window in Linux, it varies according to distribution but generally find “Terminal” in the menus. Then type and run these two commands:

cabal update
cabal install tidal

If you've never installed TidalCycles before, then the cabal install tidal step may take some time. At the end of the command output, it should say Installed tidal-x.x.x (where x.x.x is the latest version number) without any errors.

Install SuperDirt

Start SuperCollider, and in the editor window paste in the following line of code:

include("SuperDirt")

Run the code by clicking on it, to make sure the cursor is on this line, then hold down Shift and press Enter. This will download SuperDirt and you will see it has completed when the Post Window displays:

... the class library may have to be recompiled.
-> SuperDirt

After it has completed, you will need to restart SuperCollider (or alternatively, recompile the class library via the “Language” menu).

Install Atom Extension

Start Atom, and install the TidalCycles plugin. You can find it via the menus under edit > settings > install, then typing “tidalcycles” into the search box. Once that’s installed, restart atom.

Test Your Installation

Now you are ready to Start TidalCycles and SuperDirt for the first time.

Installation Troubleshooting

Supercollider run on a Jack audio server in order to deliver sound to your speakers. If you see in Supercollider's Post Window a error

Couldn't set realtime scheduling priority 1: Operation not permitted

you'll need to setup Jack with the command sudo dpkg-reconfigure jackd2 and add your username to the audio group with sudo addgroup -username- audio.

You can check if your username is already in the audio group by typing the command groups