[HN Gopher] Getting Started Strudel
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Getting Started Strudel
Author : rcarmo
Score : 125 points
Date : 2025-06-16 07:02 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (strudel.cc)
(TXT) w3m dump (strudel.cc)
| joeatwork wrote:
| Even if you're not interested in making your own music with
| Strudel, this site is worth a visit for the showcase. A lot of
| folks are making a lot of interesting music with it!
| Eduard wrote:
| tangential: just two days ago, Strudel has moved from Github to
| Codeberg (sparse discussion on their Discord homebase as to the
| motivations).
|
| For anyone having done a migration from Github to another
| platform (Codeberg, gitlab.org, selfhosted etc.): was it worth
| it? What went well, what went wrong?
| hacb wrote:
| I moved most of my projects from Github to Codeberg, and as
| anticipated got much less interactions, contributions,
| visibility etc. on them. Also Codeberg had quite some big
| issues with their underlying infrastructure during the last 2
| years, but they seem to have done a lot of work to make it more
| reliable.
|
| Now, I publish projects on Github only if they are worth
| sharing/being discovered, but most of my code is done on
| private (and sometimes public) Codeberg repositories.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| Do you mind sharing why you left github? Were you unhappy
| or/and did Codeberg offer something that no other vendor had
| so far?
| henrebotha wrote:
| That's going to make it a bit more annoying for me to
| contribute further... Oh well.
| yaxu wrote:
| In what way? It only involves typing a different url in the
| git clone or when browsing issues or whatever.
| Eduard wrote:
| I'm currently signed up to ten or so different source code
| web services hosting FLOSS (e.g. KDE, FreeDesktop, Debian
| each have their own instances).
|
| Attrition has held me back to participate in discussions or
| reporting issues. For that you need an account, and some
| source code web services make 2FA mandatory, and often I
| need to reauthenticate and go through that flow. If I'm
| exhausted, my brain makes the decision that it's not worth
| the effort.
|
| A couple of other other reasons come to mind as well:
| setting up your account properly (adding SSH public key),
| setting up yet another entry in one's own password manager,
| acknowledging that their will be additional mails going to
| my mailbox (transactional e-mails, maybe important
| informational e-mails such as data leaks, TOS changes,
| etc.).
| yaxu wrote:
| Fair enough. I'm not involved in projects at that scale,
| and projects adjacent to me all seem to be moving to
| codeberg.
| OG_BME wrote:
| Just as they were getting really popular on Twitter and X -
| it's such a shame. I like the idea of these alternative
| platforms, I'm saddened that this will likely make any kind of
| grassroots developer efforts DOA
| yaxu wrote:
| Don't see why moving from the closed source Microsoft Github
| to free/open source codeberg would turn away any grassroots
| developer. It's like two extra characters to type and live
| coders can usually type quite fast.
| humbugtheman wrote:
| the move was partly in _response_ to that unwanted popularity
| yaxu wrote:
| Speaking as a member of the Strudel project in the OP, it went
| really well, everything migrated across (issues, PRs etc)
| pretty much seamlessly. We have to self-host the ci actions,
| but as a bonus now they run much faster.
|
| It really is a no-brainer for any free/open source project to
| be hosted on a free/open source platform. It's pretty nuts that
| so many stay on Microsoft github who are busy IP-stripping
| everything via AI, even without considering all the other
| terrible stuff MS get up to that it's best not to support or be
| associated with.
|
| Quite a few live coding platforms are making the move to
| codeberg too. It's a bit trickier for desktop apps like
| supercollider who depend on cross-platform ci builds though.
| henrebotha wrote:
| Strudel is neat! A friend sent me a video recently of someone
| using it to make breakbeat music, which got me looking into it.
| I've known about live coding music for a long time but never
| actually investigated how it works.
|
| I find the fluent API plus "display-oriented REPL" a very cool
| way to do things. The docs need a lot of work, though... The only
| API reference is in a sidebar of the REPL (i.e. not in the docs
| site), and discoverability depends entirely on guessing the name
| of the function. There's multiple ways to do things and all of
| them are explained with reference to each other, so it's very
| difficult to track down an authoritative, explicit overview of
| how something works.
| thih9 wrote:
| Note: if you're on iOS and want to listen to the example, disable
| silent mode. At least that's what I had to do to hear the sound.
| croes wrote:
| Thanks for the tip
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| It is a very interesting way of making music.
|
| That being said I think something needs to be highlighted. For
| some reason, it sees itself as "low barrier to entry" relative to
| traditional ways of making music (ie partiture or an actual music
| instrument). How is possessing a phone, ability to read English
| and knowing how to program lower barrier to entry than picking an
| instrument like a piano and playing some music?
|
| Clearly, Strudel assumes some knowledge of basic music theory
| (melody, rhythm and harmony) so having that, what is it exactly
| that makes Strudel lower barrier to entry.
|
| Is Strudel assuming that learning to program is inherently easier
| than learning to play any instrument?
|
| It would be nice if whatever assumptions it has could be made
| explicit as it's not the first time that I see [insert here
| software tool to make music] claim that it's a lower barrier to
| entry to make music without saying why.
|
| Obviously, this being HN people will likely prefer software and
| algorithmic approaches to making music in your room as opposed to
| the traditional and more social way of learning with a teacher
| and a cohort of students.
| dhagz wrote:
| Really, you don't need to know how to program to do Strudel.
| Like, yeah, it's a programming language - but it's not like you
| need to know the fundamentals of software engineering to write
| something with Strudel. You just start typing and keep what
| sounds good. There is no difference between figuring out the
| melody and harmony and all the other parts of the song - you
| just type and edit until it sounds good. You get immediate
| feedback since it's constantly looping and trivial to work in
| your changes.
|
| Compare that to piano: sure, you can walk up to a piano and
| plunk out a melody easy enough - but once you start venturing
| towards harmony and song the skill required ramps up
| exponentially. Suddenly you need to have both hands doing
| independent things, know where to place your fingers so that
| you can comfortably play the notes for the current beat _and_
| future beats (there 's a ton of technique here and it's not the
| most intuitive thing ever - entire books are written to drill
| it), the list goes on.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| The lowest barrier to entry in music is something like
| GarageBand or FL Studio, not picking a piano.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| Lowest barrier for who? Younger folks sure, older people not
| sure. Unless we assume we are all tech literate
| yaxu wrote:
| I've worked with groups of 8 year olds and got them performing
| music together in less than an hour with tidal (strudel's older
| sibling). It's not easier than learning to play a drum but it's
| not really harder either.
|
| It's nothing like trying to teach kids an imperative
| programming language, it's not really in the same category as
| general purpose programming. It's designed for music making and
| you can make complex rhythms very quickly out of very simple
| parts.
| ceautery wrote:
| Neat, this is the first project I've seen in the wild that uses
| astro.
| Shalomboy wrote:
| Love this for you, but I think we have to be more careful. People
| want to make music with instruments, orthodox or otherwise. The
| optics are crazy here.
| wickedsight wrote:
| Can you elaborate? Your comment is vague enough to both pique
| my interest and also to require a ton of assumptions to mean
| anything.
| qoez wrote:
| Your mind hasn't adjusted yet to this common type of X vague-
| posting
| wickedsight wrote:
| Yeah, guess I need to take a refresher in mind reading just
| so I can keep up.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Probably some derivation of "music is art, not code", "music
| is not math", "the human touch", ...
| wickedsight wrote:
| That's what I assumed, but since assumption is the mother
| of all fuck-ups...
| ellg wrote:
| what does this even mean?
| yaxu wrote:
| A bot I expect
| wickedsight wrote:
| Cool, this feels like OpenSCAD, but for music. I'm very visually
| oriented, so I don't think this would work for me (neither does
| OpenSCAD), but I really like the concept.
| mutagen wrote:
| Take a look at the visual feedback section any try some of the
| examples, they may help. I play guitar a bit and came to
| realize that my understanding of chords and scales and some of
| music theory was very pattern based so I'm interested to see if
| that will translate to trying this intersection of music and
| programming with those visual aids.
|
| https://strudel.cc/learn/visual-feedback/
| ItCouldBeWorse wrote:
| I wish there was a LLM you could sing and beatbox too- that would
| translate that into strudel code.
| abound wrote:
| Current LLMs are multimodal -- you could record yourself
| singing + beatboxing, upload it to an LLM and ask it to
| translate it to Strudel code.
|
| My best guess is that it won't work well, but we'll never know
| until someone tries it.
| paulgb wrote:
| My experience is that the best LLMs can produce syntactically
| valid strudel but don't understand the actual semantics of
| the "mini notation" language, unfortunately.
| JonnyReads wrote:
| This is so cool. Years ago I was at a maker conference and there
| was a tent hosting an Algorave (https://algorave.com/) which
| introduced me to the whole scene of live coded music. Really
| niche subject but very interesting.
| yaxu wrote:
| Emfcamp?
| yapyap wrote:
| someone watches theprimagen
| gooob wrote:
| was thinking the same thing lol
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| The https://strudel.cc/learn/visual-feedback/ section is a great
| demo.
| jarmitage wrote:
| I released this remix with Strudel last year:
| https://strudel.cc/?mTeJt_ICoPrw
|
| https://open.spotify.com/track/39K9sFCNCv7H5kyQAfcePr?si=8a1...
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| The editor is really cool, how it highlights what parts of the
| file are active as the song plays.
| dzink wrote:
| I love this site! Great tool to make music and save music ideas
| and it's low threshold fun way for people to get into code as
| well.
| Archit3ch wrote:
| The underrated aspect with Strudel is that you don't have to
| install anything.
| pwatsonwailes wrote:
| Currently using the Superdough and transpiler parts of Strudel as
| part of the game engine I'm making. God I wish it was better
| documented though.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Am I the only one who clicked through because they were looking
| for tips on how to make apple strudel?
| shlomo_z wrote:
| no
| crabmusket wrote:
| This takes me back - I was playing around with Tidal and
| Supercollider over a decade ago at uni. I was terrible but it was
| great fun.
| skeptrune wrote:
| Editor is the coolest part about this. Makes the display of work
| easy and fun
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(page generated 2025-06-19 23:01 UTC)