northern-information/dronecaster

cast drones & record whatever returns

dronecaster

Installation

1. Install via maiden or clone/download the repo to dust/code.
2. Restart norns to pickup the SuperCollider Dronecaster engine.
3. Drone!

Contribute

We need more SynthDefs! Join the discussion on lines: https://l.llllllll.co/dronecaster

dronecaster's Issues

'Ruins' leaks resources

in PR #37 , the Routine created in _meta_Ruins.scd is never halted or freed.

the supercollider interpreter environment on norns is not reset between scripts or engine changes. (we like it that way for a couple reasons; e.g. it allows well-behaved scripts/engines to acheive aural continuity.)

therefore it is very important that engines clean up all their allocated resources in their cleanup method. this does not just mean scsynth resources like buffers, groups etc, but also sclang objects that you've created at the top-level scope, or which outlive their scope. (this Routine is both.)

to illustrate the issue, ive created this branch, and added a seed value and a counter to the routine:
https://github.com/catfact/dronecaster/blob/test-leaked-routine/engine/drones/_meta_Ruins.scd#L129-L138

this exposes the issue in the REPL output: every time the dronecaster script is launched, a new instance of the Routine is constructed, which will never be halted or freed until norns undergoes a restart/shutdown. that's not great (yes, in itself the routine does not use a lot of resources, but we dont want an unbounded number of them anyway, and actually OSC traffic bandwidth is a system bottleneck.)

@ambv you have a couple options for fixing this:

• combine all this stuff into one synthdef. it is doable. Demand is your friend.
• figure out a mechanism by which your Routine and whatever else in this category is registered with the engine class when your drone starts, so it can be cleaned up when the script is cleared.