Problem with new installation

Hi,

I’m having a strange problem on my new installation (3.11.2) and have not used sc for some time, so I am at a loss here…

I am trying to get sc to run on a Surface Go 2 tablet with Debian testing.

It works to a certain degree, e.g. “{SinOsc.ar}.play” does produce the expected sound but events as simple as:

().play

should produce a sound (it works on my pc) but it does not. I am not getting any error, there simply is no audible sound produced.

Does anyone have an idea what this problem might be?

Many thanks!

It’s useful in such cases to check the outgoing signal visually as well as aurally.

Both pitch and volume are different between those two tests: { SinOsc.ar }.play is 440 Hz at full scale, while ().play is 261.xxx Hz at -20 dBFS (because the default event’s amp is 0.1, not 1.0).

If you set the system volume so that it’s comfortable to listen to 440 Hz at 0 dBFS, then it’s very likely that a lower pitch 20 dB quieter would be hard to hear.

So I would check the level meter (s.meter). For me, the meter reports peaks around -26 dB for ().play. (The default synthdef’s sustain level is 0.7 rather than 1, so the actual volume will be lower than the given amp.)

(Anecdote from my past: I once updated SC sources and rebuilt, and I was testing on a laptop by running { SinOsc.ar(110, 0, 0.1).dup }.play and became frantic because I wasn’t hearing anything… then, somebody on the mailing list pointed out that built-in laptop speakers can’t produce frequencies below about 200 Hz. I had been in a panic that “SC is broken!!!1!1!!” but it’s just that my test was not well-conceived. From this I learned to check multiple ways – don’t rely on just one or two data points.)

hjh