[PlanetCCRMA] trouble getting started with Common Music

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Sun, 2007-04-22 at 23:15 -0700, bernie arai wrote:
> after reading Dave Phillps' mention of it in his "At the Soudning
> Edge" column from a while a ago (thanks dave for the great read as
> always), i'm prompted  to try out Common Music, but i'm a little in
> over my head with setting things up.  the abundance of "common" family
> packages from planetccrma (FC5) is making my head spin. 
> 
> i want to try the tutorials from the CM website, which advise that i
> use emacs via SLIME.  following the instructions at
> http://commonmusic.sourceforge.net/doc/emacs.html i've run into a
> stumbling block where i think that i don't know the correct path to
> SLIME or cm, which i've installed from the planet.  after adding the
> lines as per instructions, starting emacs gives me: 
> 
> File error: "Cannot open load file", "listener.el"
> 
> and trying to start M-x cm gives me:
> 
> Symbol's function definition is void: slime-connected-p
> 
> which are both beyond my experience with emacs, slime and cm, so no go
> so far. 

I'd recommend sbcl as the "base lisp" on which to run everything. 
So, if you need cm you have to install "cm-sbcl", and you also want
"slime-sbcl" for the slimmy part of the process (those will pull in
other needed packages). 

For configuring slime you just need to add this to emacs:

---- cut here ----
;;; slime configuration
(setq inferior-lisp-program "/usr/bin/cm-sbcl")

(add-to-list 'load-path "/usr/share/slime")
(require 'slime)
(slime-setup)
---- cut here ----

Restart emacs and then do "<esc> x" and type "slime" followed by return.
Common Music will start to be loaded, wait till the slime listener
starts and greets you with a <CM> prompt and then you are in lisp land
(/usr/bin/cm-sbcl is the "executable" that starts the whole thing - you
could run that in a terminal to make sure it starts). 

I think the cm in fc5 is still the old one so some examples might not
run as shown in the recent sourceforge instructions. 

If you want to use clm (sound synthesis/processing) you need to install
clm-sbcl, if you want it to be autoloaded into cm when cm starts you
will also need cm-clm-sbcl. Same naming for cmn (score generation). 

> swimming in packages, i thought i'd try and install the cm-clisp
> package (do i need it?) but yum complains:
> 
> Missing Dependency: clisp = 2.39 is needed by package cm-clisp
> 
> even though i have clisp 2.41 installed.

That's because I have to rebuild cm on the newer clisp... but you should
not use cm on clisp, some things like the realtime scheduler will not
work. 

I'll see if I can get the newer cm/clm/cmn/fomus built on fc5. 

-- Fernando