Differences from 'normal' SuperCollider

SuperCollider-Android is not quite the same as SuperCollider you might download for Mac/Linux/Windows. The main differences:

• No language client. We’ve ported the audio engine, not the language client. So for example you can write a Java app which uses it, or maybe you could control SC-Android remotely from your laptop …

• Latency. The Android platform (at time of writing) doesn’t give us very good guarantees at all about latency, which means that low-latency audio processing is just not happening yet. Please vote for Android issue 3434 which asks google to give developers a good API for low-latency audio!

• AIDL-based communication available. The “traditional” way to send OSC messages around is over an internet port (i.e. UDP or TCP). Android provides an interfacing system called AIDL which allows Android processes to pass messages between each other. You can still use the traditional approach, but we also created a SuperCollider AIDL interface here which you might like to use from a Java application.

• Embeddable in Java-based applications. Android services/activities are normally written in Java. SuperCollider-Android embeds SuperCollider’s “native” code into a Java-based application – and you can do the same! See for example ScanVox which uses SuperCollider-Android as a library project, to make SuperCollider into the audio engine underpinning a GUI app developed in Java.

• Not all UGens yet included. The vast majority of the unit generators (UGens) are included in the bundle, but there are some which we haven’t got round to including. If there’s one that you particularly miss, please file an issue asking for it!