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The Alda player

Alda is designed so that playback is asynchronous. When you use the Alda client to play a score, the client sends a bunch of OSC messages to a player process running in the background.

The player process is agnostic of the Alda language. It simply receives and handles OSC messages containing lower-level instructions pertaining to audio playback.

The player supports live coding in that it allows you to define, modify, and loop patterns during playback.

Development

Once you're all set up to run the Alda player process locally, have a look at the development guide for a high-level overview of the code base.

Requirements

  • Java 8+

    • You probably already have Java 8 or higher installed.

      To check what version of Java you have, you can run java -version.

  • Gradle (optional)

    • There is a gradlew wrapper script checked into the repo that makes it so that you don't need to have Gradle installed.

      In the commands below, you can replace gradle with ./gradlew and it should work the same as if you had Gradle installed.

Running a player process

After following the instructions below to start a player process on a particular port, you can then use the Alda client to send messages on the same port.

There are two ways to run the player process locally:

  • Basic: run a script and pass it arguments as if you're running alda-player on your PATH. Takes a little bit longer sometimes, but is more convenient most of the time and it's exactly like running a release executable.

  • Gradle: use gradle (or ./gradlew) for faster builds (no need to fully compile the executable) and more control over build options. Useful if you're handy with Gradle and you know what you're doing.

Basic

To run the player with no arguments, which displays usage information:

# equivalent to running `alda-player`
bin/run

To run the player, listening on port 27278 (or replace with the port number of your choosing):

# equivalent to running `alda-player run -p 27278`
bin/run run -p 27278

Gradle

To run the player with no arguments, which displays usage information:

# equivalent to running `alda-player`
gradle run

To run the player, listening on port 27278 (or replace with the port number of your choosing):

# equivalent to running `alda-player run -p 27278`
gradle run --args "run -p 27278"

License

Copyright © 2019-2024 Dave Yarwood, et al

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License version 2.0.