Stream Supercollider on an Ubuntu Cloud Server using Darkice, Jackd and Icecast

The scenario - you have some kind of generative music app that you've written in Supercollider, or you want to have a Supercollider server in a stable place that's accessable to the whole internet, perhaps to have it collect data from or send data to other apps.  A cloud server is just a Linux machine in the cloud, and Supercollider runs on Linux, so why not run Supercollider in the cloud.

TL; DR (and caveat) - I never really had a solid deployment with this setup, and I suspect this is probably easier to do with Overtone.  Overtone is a Supercollider client / server implementation built in Clojure.  Clojure is an implementation of Common Lisp built on top of Java, so you get the whole ecosystem of tried and true Java apps wrapped in a fun client language.

If you have a supercollider stack running on a webserver, please comment - the deployment which I'm describing here is not optimal and I'd like to hear how others have done it.

Getting this set up took me a lot of moving parts and the process could probably be improved.  The deal is you get sclang running, which lets you build synths and control them, and then you need to take the signal generated by scsyth and pipe it to your Icecast server, but do it all without actually having a soundcard on your virtual machine.  This is where the recursively-named JACK Audio Connection Kit  comes into play.  Jack does a lot of things - one of them is to act as a virtual patch cable that will let you send audio signal between running apps without the use of a soundcard.

So, the whole setup is Sclang -> Scsynth -> Jackd -> Darkice -> Icecast2, plus Monit to make sure the whole thing is running, which is a lot of moving parts.


Sclang to run your supercollider code on the server.  (You could also control supercollider from a separate client on a home computer).  Scsynth to generate audio signal.  Jackd to patch that signal into your streaming server.  Darkice is the streaming server, which encodes the audio signal for the web, and Icecast2 is the application that takes the audio stream and serves it up in a web page, or for an app like iTunes to listen to.

Here's some pages that I found helpful in getting things  set up:

Setting up Darkice

Jackd and darkice, with jackd running dummy soundcards

Running darkice as a background process

What is Darkice


One of the problems I had with this set up is that if you're running under constant CPU load you're much more likely to crash on a virtual server than on a desktop computer or other dedicated hardware. The CPU allocation on a virtual server isn't really constant and spikes in CPU usage can cause your CPU allocation from scsynth to overload and the scsynth process will crash.  You can use something like Supervisor or Monit to restart the process after a crash.

This is a blog post from howtonode.org about using monit and upstart to restart a process after it crashes.

I'm not currently running this stack on backtrace.us - If I have time to get a stable deployment going, I'll post an update with more notes on configuration.