Category: ruby

personal ruby buddha machine

Some days ago I came across a post on the FM3 buddha machine. Finding it a fascinating concept, and being able to download their samples I sprinkled a few lines of ruby over them an stirred. Voilà – my own personal buddha machine playing wonderful ambient soundscapes in a random fashion. Using the sdl_ruby library, the whole thing became surprisingly simple:

#!/usr/bin/ruby -w
require 'sdl'
SDL.init(SDL::INIT_AUDIO)
SDL::Mixer.open(44100,SDL::Mixer::DEFAULT_FORMAT,2,4096)
 
clips = Dir.new('audio').entries.delete_if {|x| ! (x =~ /wav$/)}
while true
        for i in 1..SDL::Mixer.allocate_channels(4)
                        if not SDL::Mixer.play?(i)
                                SDL::Mixer.playChannel(i,SDL::Mixer::Wave.load("audio/"+clips[rand(clips.length)]),rand(30))
                        end
        end
        sleep 0.5
end

Numerical sorting in ruby

Quick note on how to do numerical sorting in ruby.
When calling sort, ruby will perform a lexicographical sorting by default, meaning that the following array

1
2

a=["0","10","9","1"]
a.sort.each{|val| p val}

will output 

"0"
"1"
"10"
"9"

If this is not what you want, this might be it:

1

a.sort{|x,y| x.to_i < => y.to_i}.each { |val| p val }

outputs:

"0"
"1"
"9"
"10"

Yay, blocks to the rescue:)