Getting Started Strudel
38 comments
·June 16, 2025henrebotha
Strudel is neat! A friend sent me a video recently of someone using it to make breakbeat music, which got me looking into it. I've known about live coding music for a long time but never actually investigated how it works.
I find the fluent API plus "display-oriented REPL" a very cool way to do things. The docs need a lot of work, though… The only API reference is in a sidebar of the REPL (i.e. not in the docs site), and discoverability depends entirely on guessing the name of the function. There's multiple ways to do things and all of them are explained with reference to each other, so it's very difficult to track down an authoritative, explicit overview of how something works.
whywhywhywhy
The https://strudel.cc/learn/visual-feedback/ section is a great demo.
jan_Inkepa
The editor is really cool, how it highlights what parts of the file are active as the song plays.
JonnyReads
This is so cool. Years ago I was at a maker conference and there was a tent hosting an Algorave (https://algorave.com/) which introduced me to the whole scene of live coded music. Really niche subject but very interesting.
yaxu
Emfcamp?
thih9
Note: if you’re on iOS and want to listen to the example, disable silent mode. At least that’s what I had to do to hear the sound.
croes
Thanks for the tip
joeatwork
Even if you’re not interested in making your own music with Strudel, this site is worth a visit for the showcase. A lot of folks are making a lot of interesting music with it!
ItCouldBeWorse
I wish there was a LLM you could sing and beatbox too- that would translate that into strudel code.
abound
Current LLMs are multimodal -- you could record yourself singing + beatboxing, upload it to an LLM and ask it to translate it to Strudel code.
My best guess is that it won't work well, but we'll never know until someone tries it.
Eduard
tangential: just two days ago, Strudel has moved from Github to Codeberg (sparse discussion on their Discord homebase as to the motivations).
For anyone having done a migration from Github to another platform (Codeberg, gitlab.org, selfhosted etc.): was it worth it? What went well, what went wrong?
yaxu
Speaking as a member of the Strudel project in the OP, it went really well, everything migrated across (issues, PRs etc) pretty much seamlessly. We have to self-host the ci actions, but as a bonus now they run much faster.
It really is a no-brainer for any free/open source project to be hosted on a free/open source platform. It's pretty nuts that so many stay on Microsoft github who are busy IP-stripping everything via AI, even without considering all the other terrible stuff MS get up to that it's best not to support or be associated with.
Quite a few live coding platforms are making the move to codeberg too. It's a bit trickier for desktop apps like supercollider who depend on cross-platform ci builds though.
hacb
I moved most of my projects from Github to Codeberg, and as anticipated got much less interactions, contributions, visibility etc. on them. Also Codeberg had quite some big issues with their underlying infrastructure during the last 2 years, but they seem to have done a lot of work to make it more reliable.
Now, I publish projects on Github only if they are worth sharing/being discovered, but most of my code is done on private (and sometimes public) Codeberg repositories.
bossyTeacher
Do you mind sharing why you left github? Were you unhappy or/and did Codeberg offer something that no other vendor had so far?
OG_BME
Just as they were getting really popular on Twitter and X - it's such a shame. I like the idea of these alternative platforms, I'm saddened that this will likely make any kind of grassroots developer efforts DOA
yaxu
Don't see why moving from the closed source Microsoft Github to free/open source codeberg would turn away any grassroots developer. It's like two extra characters to type and live coders can usually type quite fast.
humbugtheman
the move was partly in response to that unwanted popularity
henrebotha
That's going to make it a bit more annoying for me to contribute further… Oh well.
yaxu
In what way? It only involves typing a different url in the git clone or when browsing issues or whatever.
Eduard
I'm currently signed up to ten or so different source code web services hosting FLOSS (e.g. KDE, FreeDesktop, Debian each have their own instances).
Attrition has held me back to participate in discussions or reporting issues. For that you need an account, and some source code web services make 2FA mandatory, and often I need to reauthenticate and go through that flow. If I'm exhausted, my brain makes the decision that it's not worth the effort.
A couple of other other reasons come to mind as well: setting up your account properly (adding SSH public key), setting up yet another entry in one's own password manager, acknowledging that their will be additional mails going to my mailbox (transactional e-mails, maybe important informational e-mails such as data leaks, TOS changes, etc.).
ceautery
Neat, this is the first project I've seen in the wild that uses astro.
wickedsight
Cool, this feels like OpenSCAD, but for music. I'm very visually oriented, so I don't think this would work for me (neither does OpenSCAD), but I really like the concept.
I released this remix with Strudel last year: https://strudel.cc/?mTeJt_ICoPrw
https://open.spotify.com/track/39K9sFCNCv7H5kyQAfcePr?si=8a1...