Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Sooperlooper


I have been playing with SooperLooper, a pretty cool and simple looper application for Linux and Mac. I use ubuntu and installation there is simple, it is available in the software center if you use the gui or with sudo apt-get install sooperlooper if you are more hardcore. The application has 2 parts, a GUI and the server which communicate with each other using OSC, the standard aiming to replace Midi. You can run the server only with the command sooperlooper and you can run the GUI+server with slgui

My first tests were done with the GUI. You need to run slgui and make the right connections in JACK. I use QJackCtl and this are the connections I set up for redirecting audio input to slgui capture and its output to the audio output:



I am interested on running the looper headless, so I have been investigating on how to send OSC commands from the command line. I installed pyliblo-utils: sudo apt-get install pyliblo-utils which adds a tool called send_osc and dump_osc to send and receive OSC messages. Once I did that I opened 3 terminals running the following things on each:

Terminal 1: run sooperlooper (without GUI), this is listening OSC commands in port 9951 by default
Terminal 2: run dump_osc to receive OSC commands at port 9952: dump_osc 9952
Terminal 3: this is where things get interesting:
First I run the ping command:
send_osc 9951 /ping osc.udp://localhost:9952/ osc.udp://localhost:9952/
And I get the following in Terminal 2:
osc.udp://localhost:9952/ ,ssi osc.udp://berenjena:9951/ 1.7.0 1

then I tried other commands from the sooperlooper documentation here.

Next steps: I might think of a way to interface sooperlooper from a keyboard by converting keystrokes to OSC. I also would like to see how it performs in a raspberry pi (EDIT: Seems like someone has been having similar thoughts: http://journeytounknownsoundscapes.blogspot.com.es/2015/05/a-new-looper-in-town-raspberry-pi-with.html?view=classic )