Supercollider book 2nd edition?

Resources
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It looks like there’s a new 2nd edition of the Supercollider book. As a newcomer to SC, I found Eli Fieldsteel’s book to be more helpful than the 1st edition of the Supercollider book, which seemed more geared to academics and advanced users, and not so well written/organized IMO. Does anyone know if the 2nd edition has been completely re-written, or is it more that a few new chapters have been added for latest developments? Since it’s very pricey ( 150 USD! ), I’m wondering if it’s a significant departure and re-write from the 1st edition or not.

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It has been revised, and there is some new content.
Some of my not as good writing likely didn’t change from the first edition :smiley:
Josh

/*
Josh Parmenter
www.realizedsound.net/josh
*/

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It remains top notch!

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If you’re looking for a chapter-by-chapter step-by-step SC tutorial that’s organized progressively from beginner gradually up to more advanced topics, neither the 1st nor 2nd edition are meant to be that.

From that perspective, I guess one could say you’d be just as disappointed with the writing in the 2nd edition as you were with the 1st – but, those who enjoyed the 1st edition are likely to enjoy the 2nd even more.

(FWIW my chapter is a complete rewrite, now about using the preprocessor to implement new syntax.)

hjh

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What an inspired choice - it’s the kind of exploration that makes SuperCollider so fascinating, always going beyond what was planned to be.

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I am happy to be reading this with Kindle edition!

Is this book produced using LaTeX, or other software like InCopy, InDesign and QuarkExpress?

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Hi,

you can find infos about the second edition already on several sites, e.g. here’s a good overview on chapters plus foreword and introduction (-> “look inside”):

Many thanks to all involved !

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Mine arrives tomorrow! That stated, wish the physical edition included a digital copy

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Thanks all people involved for for making a 2nd edition a thing!
BTW - is the digital version epub only or are there retailers which sell a PDF version?

Is there a way to publish the articles of the Developer Topics under a more permissive license so we could include them in the SC source code? These chapters are the best articles about the inner mechanics of SC and would be great if they become part of the source code.

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That price is crazy. For comparison the Computer Music Tutorial is only $125, despite being almost twice the length.

This is definitely priced for institutions rather than individuals. Such a pity.

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Does anyone know where the code examples are for the 2nd edition? The MIT publisher website shows it as GitHub - supercollider/scbookcode: The code examples used in the SuperCollider book published by MIT but that appears to be the code from the 1st edition ( github shows no recent updates and is missing new chapters ).

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It’s on the newedition branch: GitHub - supercollider/scbookcode at newedition

@muellmusik I’m wondering how we should manage the code the for the two versions. Obviously, we want to keep the code for the first edition. What is the master branch supposed to contain in this case? Maybe we should just have first-edition and second-edition branches, with the latter as the default branch?

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The plan was to merge the new edition into master but keep first edition. I’ll look at that tomorrow

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Thank you. I had a couple of questions about DemandEnvGen in Figure 19.12 ( in chapter 19 ). at the below line :

I’m not too familiar with DemandEnvGen but assume I should be able to see the envelope graph/gui for it in this example using plot? How would I do that ( I was getting errors trying it)?

Also, for Dswitch1, am a bit confused by this code. So for amplitude values for example, it is creating an array of 17 (numBps) instances of Dbrown and cycling through them to create the array of amplitudes, something like that?

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Okay, done. I also made a release: Release v2.0 · supercollider/scbookcode · GitHub

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@eboats I’m glad to hear you’re enjoying the chapter!

If you’d like to plot the waveform of that DSS example, try using the .plot method instead of .play. Experiment with different durations for the plot (based on the parameters of that example, I have the impression that durations around 0.15 seconds work well). This should allow you to observe several cycles of the waveform as it changes over time.

So, put .plot(0.15) instead of the .play at the end of the code.

Also, for Dswitch1, am a bit confused by this code. So for amplitude values for example, it is creating an array of 17 (numBps) instances of Dbrown and cycling through them to create the array of amplitudes, something like that?

Yes, exactly.

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