Page Text: The Tidal Pattern engine (Tidal Cycles itself)
Manual installation #
Before installing Tidal, make sure to install Haskell (via Ghcup ), SuperCollider with SC3 Plugins , Git . You also need to choose and install a text editor for interacting with Tidal Cycles (see the sidebar).
Installation process #
Ghcup #
In a terminal window, we will add the path to our GHC installation to a file that is executed by our terminal every time it loads. For macOS 10.14 or before, the terminal uses bash, so the file we need to modify is .bashrc:
. "$HOME/.ghcup/env"
echo '. $HOME/.ghcup/env' >> "$HOME/.bashrc"
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For macOS10.15 Catalina, the terminal uses zsh, so the file we need to modify is .zshrc:
. "$HOME/.ghcup/env"
echo '. $HOME/.ghcup/env' >> "$HOME/.zshrc"
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After this, we will use cabal to first update it package directory, and then to install the TidalCycles library. We will also run these two commands every time we want to update our TidalCycles library to the latest version.
cabal update
cabal install tidal --lib
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If you've never installed TidalCycles before, then the cabal install tidal --lib step may take some time. At the end of the command output, it should say Installed tidal-x.x.x (where x.x.x is the latest version number) without any errors.
SuperDirt #
Start your freshly installed version of SuperCollider. Paste the following line of code in the text editor you see and press Cmd+Return to evaluate :
Quarks.checkForUpdates({Quarks.install("SuperDirt", "v1.7.2"); thisProcess.recompile()})
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Run the code by clicking on it, to make sure the cursor is on this line, then hold down Shift and press Enter.
It'll take a while to install. You'll see something like the following:
Installing SuperDirt