This repository contains the community collection of unit generator plugins for SuperCollider.
An installation extends the functionality of SuperCollider by additional UGens that run on scsynth
, the SuperCollider audio synthesis server.
Please note that the UGens in this repository are, on average, less stable and well-maintained than the core collection. Use at your own risk!
Note: Extensions for the SuperCollider programming language are different. They are collected within the Quarks packaging system.
To learn how to write your own plugins, see example-plugins and the "Writing UGens" helpfile.
For community discussion and support see the SuperCollider mailing lists and the github issue tracker.
Releases are available from the GitHub release page. For older versions (2013), see the Sourceforge project page.
Unzip the release and move it to your SuperCollider extensions folder. You can find it by evaluating
Platform.userExtensionDir
in SuperCollider. To evaluate code in SuperCollder, put your cursor on the line of code and press Cmd+Enter
(macOS) or Ctrl+Enter
. Alternatively, you may install the extensions system-wide by copying to
Platform.systemExtensionDir
The folder might not exist, so you may need to create it yourself. You can do this in your operating system's file explorer or from within SuperCollider by evaluating:
File.mkdir(Platform.userExtensionDir)
On some operating systems, these directories may be hard to find because they're in hidden folders. You can open
the user app support directory (where the Extensions folder is) with the menu item
"File->Open user support directory". On macOS, you can open a finder window and press Cmd+Shift+G
and enter the
name of the directory.
Download both the SuperCollider source and the source for this repository:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/supercollider/sc3-plugins.git
git clone --recursive https://github.com/supercollider/supercollider.git
Note, if you are building for an older version of supercollider you should checkout the sc3-plugins tag which matches the version of supercollider.
Be sure to use --recursive
, or to initialize the submodules after cloning, otherwise you will not have files
that are necessary to build the project.
Like SuperCollider, sc3-plugins uses cmake
. Execute the following commands in the directory where you cloned sc3-plugins;
replace /path/to/sc/
with the path to the SuperCollider source directory. That will probably be
../../supercollider
if you cloned both repositories in the same working directory.
cd sc3-plugins
mkdir build && cd build
# for both scsynth and supernova plugins; set -DSUPERNOVA=OFF to build only scsynth plugins
cmake -DSC_PATH=/path/to/sc/ -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DSUPERNOVA=ON ..
cmake --build . --config Release
# to install the plugins - note: linux users likely need sudo
cmake --build . --config Release --target install
If no SC_PATH
is provided the build system assumes the SuperCollider include files are in /usr/include/SuperCollider/
.
On macOS, the plugins will end up in sc3-plugins/build/SC3plugins
.
Copy the SC3plugins
folder to your Extensions folder (evaluate Platform.userExtensionDir
in SuperCollider to find it).
NOTE: on macOS, if you want to install into CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX
, you have to specify it by disabling the IN_PLACE_BUILD
cmake option which defaults to ON (see below).
Note for SuperCollider < 3.9.1 The Supernova server on macOS and Windows incorrectly searches for plugins in the /Extensions/plugins
directory. The scsynth server correctly searches for plugins in /Extensions
. If Supernova is unable to find the sc3-plugins, make sure that they are located in /Extensions/plugins
.
See the README in source/HOAUGens
for information on compiling the HOAUGens (higher-order
ambisonics) subproject.
/usr/local
)cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local ..
CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX
cmake -DIN_PLACE_BUILD=ON
cmake -DQUARKS=ON ..
cmake -DSUPERNOVA=ON ..
sc3-plugins/build/$ cmake -DLADSPA=ON ..
lib
directory (eg. lib64
)
cmake -DLIB_SUFFIX=64
sc3-plugins/build/$ cmake -L ..
On some Linux distributions it has been reported that Ladspa UGen could prevent SuperCollider server from booting (sc3-plugins/#210, sc3-plugins/#23 and supercollider/#4421). See above how to build sc3-plugins without Ladspa if needed.
If you get an error while building that files are missing, it probably means that you didn't clone all the SuperCollider
submodules. Fix this by running git submodule update --init
in the SuperCollider source directory. If you still have the
issue afterwards, try clearing your build directory and starting your build from scratch.
If something went wrong and you want to start from scratch, delete everything in the build directory that you made:
make uninstall # only if you ran `make install` before
cd ..
rm -r build
A SuperCollider plugin is a collection of UGens (and their supporting files) with a shared prefix in their name. If you add a new plugin, please keep to the following pattern:
source
directory named <prefix>UGens
where prefix
means whichever standard pattern in the file name you have for your UGens. All source files go into this directory and its subdirectories..sc|.schelp|...
) should be located in a subdirectory named sc
.git-submodule
), add them to sc3-plugins/external_libraries/
.
As an example, the GlitchUGens
plugin directory lists as:
source/GlitchUGens/GlitchUGens.cpp
source/GlitchUGens/sc/GlitchUGens.sc
source/GlitchUGens/sc/HelpSource/Classes/GlitchBPF.schelp
source/GlitchUGens/sc/HelpSource/Classes/GlitchBRF.schelp
source/GlitchUGens/sc/HelpSource/Classes/GlitchHPF.schelp
source/GlitchUGens/sc/HelpSource/Classes/GlitchRHPF.schelp
PLUGIN_DIRS
list in sc3-plugins/source/CMakeLists.txt
.Generate_Quark.scd
in sc3-plugins/quarks/
. Evaluating it indexes the base directory of the extensions for each UGen, and Help-file in each plugin directory.
It then creates a help file for your plugin that lists all classes and help files, as well as a .quark
file for your plugin in the build/DIRECTORY
folder.To create an OSX DiskImage, follow these steps on an OSX machine:
mkdir build && cd build
cmake -DSC_PATH=/path/to/sc/ -DOSX_PACKAGE=1 ..
make && make install
The DiskImage will be generated in ./sc3-plugins/build/build_osx
containing
License.txt
,README.txt
, andSC3plugins
folder.DIRECTORY
-folder is also included by default.mkdir build && cd build
cmake -DSC_PATH=/path/to/sc/ ..
cpack -G TGZ # `-G ZIP` also works
The package will end up in sc3-plugins/build
.
In addition to the plugins listed below, this project contains several FAUST-generated UGens for
higher-order ambisonics ("HOAUGens"), which are not built by default. See the README in
source/HOAUGens
for more information.
An auto-generated list of what plugins are available in this repository, linking to the autogenerated helpfiles: