cleary / minipat

Music pattern language + live coding environment

minipat

Music pattern language + live coding environment

This project is a love letter to Tidal. The pattern language is mostly the same, as are many of the combinators. It can even play music using SuperDirt!

What does minipat add?

• Swappable backends - see how small minipat-dirt is!
• A live MIDI backend (minipat-midi)
• Patterns can be pretty-printed back into textual form.
• The pattern language has a plain old syntax tree (Pat) with standard functions for traversal and recursion (even through location annotations).
• Lots of tiny changes...

If you have stack installed, and you have supercollider running for use with tidal, you should be able to run bin/minipat dirt to enter ghci with everything set up:

[Info] Initializing
[Info] Handshaking ...
[Info] ... handshake succeeded

-- Play kick-snare in orbit 1
> d1 $ s "bd sd"

The MIDI backend requies basically no setup (bin/minipat midi):

-- Send some MIDI note on/off events
> d1 $ n "c5 d6"

However, if you have different port settings for SuperDirt or want to use a non-default MIDI output, you will probably have to edit the Repl.ghci files in either backend or run reallocate myBackendOptions myCoreOptions >>= initialize in the REPL.

Please be aware that this is young software in an "it works for me" state!

Editor integration

There is a Neovim plugin - see the README for installation instructions.

Contributions

Your help is very welcome. Some TODOs follow.

TODO

• Implement polymeters
• Implement chords/arps
• Add more MIDI channel voice events
• Support rendering to MIDI file (with dahdit-midi)
• Additional combinators like arp, off, jux, |+, every, squiz, range
• Backends for... Bitwig? Renoise?
• Backend with push/pull of textual patterns from DAW
• More meaningful Pretty subclasses for pattern rep or plain old logging
• More and better documentation
• Ensure that common exceptions have a useful displayException
• Ensure that live errors do/don't interrupt playback based on debug state
• More thoughtful handling of "continuous" streams/signals (including sampling rate)

License

This project is BSD-licensed. It is a bottom-up semi-compatible rewrite of Tidal that uses certain APIs, algorithms, names, types, and constants according to "fair use."