From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2008-01-21T04:07:02+09:00
Subject: Re: [CM] Re: Cmdist digest, Vol 1 #1310 - 2 msgs

Noah Thorp wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I am organizer for the Bay Area Computer Music Technology Group and I am 
> organizing a gathering in San Francisco to discuss integration of Ruby 
> and various audio libraries.
> I know that SND offers support for Ruby and there may be other planet 
> CCRMA apps that offer support. If you would like to come to the event 
> and share what you know about what exists and what can be extended, you 
> would be very welcome. The group has a great deal of expertise and 
> enthusiasm. Details about the event and the group are here:
> http://electronicmusic.meetup.com/152/calendar/6806947/
> 
> Thanks!
> Noah Thorp
> Bay Area Computer Music Technology Group Organizer

I've taken the liberty of cross-posting this to Ruby-Talk, where all my 
co-Rubyists hang out. I won't be able to attend, but I'm really 
interested in the subject. Some miscellaneous notes on what I know:

1. As you may know, Gridflow did at one time use Ruby as its main 
scripting language, but I think the developer abandoned Ruby for some 
reason. I haven't done much with Gridflow, so I can't comment further.

2. jRuby is in most cases faster than Ruby 1.8.6 on any given platform. 
And jRuby will interface with all the Java sound APIs "out of the box". 
If jMax is still alive, this might be hackable.

3. I'm currently getting back into CSound and would love a Ruby 
interface. I have one of those OLPC XO laptops, which come by default 
with CSound and Python wrappers. Python is the scripting language of 
choice for many CSound people, though, and the XO does not come with 
Ruby installed. I have Ruby installed and it runs just fine.

4. I've loaded CM on my XO -- it's rather tricky because you have to mix 
Planet CCRMA, OLPC, Fedora and Fedora Updates to get all the 
dependencies resolved. I'm using the SBCL version. I haven't attempted 
to do anything yet -- I just got the install to work yesterday!

5. In the Ruby Gems repository, there are gems for win32-sound, SDL, 
OpenAL, and some of the streaming protocols.

6. Just about any C or C++ library can be interfaced to Ruby, as well as 
other scripting languages, using the SWIG wrapper/interface generator. 
See http://www.swig.org for copious documentation. SWIG will interface 
with Ruby, Tcl, Python, Perl, Pike, Lua, PHP, Java, R, a couple of 
Schemes and at least one Lisp, but I forget which one.

7. You can find other packages by going to http:rubyforge.org and doing 
a search for "audio" and "music". Relative to Lisp, Java and Python, 
there's not much, but it is growing.