First steps with Flucuma

Usage Questions
1

Hello,
I am taking first steps with Flucoma this week, and since people normally raise issues only if things go badly, I want to point out that I am impressed with the quality of the project and all going well!

I managed to build the CLI tools on Linux easily enough, and the Pure Data externals work nicely too. Some of the docs in the reference are incredible, with interactive demos of how the object works!

One question - how does Learn FluCoMa relate to GitHub - flucoma/flucoma-docs: Documentation for Fluid Corpus Manipulation ? There is a load of useful info in the doc/*.rst files, like the params of each object, which would be nice to see on the website.

I have too many plans and too little time for what I might do with these great objects, will leave that for another time - but this recent article on Kaizo Snare gave some good inspiration! :slight_smile:
Happy music making
Sam

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2

Hi and welcome :slight_smile:

Thank you for your feedback on the various things that are helping with your first steps. It’s also good to hear building was a breeze for you!

I won’t speak for all of my colleagues, we are still working on the relationship between Learn and creative coding environment’s various resources. To put it as concisely as possible, Learn is a place where we can discuss things in more detail (Explore and Learn for example] as well as generate materials that would otherwise be difficult to make in all four of the environments we support.

It’s also a place we can more easily create links between different concepts and resources. For example linking to a more discursive article about buffer processing is hard to both make and then implement with parity across PD, Max and SC, whereas the web its a bit more simple as well as automatic. I hope that somewhat answers your question and perhaps I’d invite @tedmoore to steer my explanation in a more refined direction.

This is solid gold feedback and something we have debated internally. Just out of curiousity, because I was on the side of not including all this information in Learn, how would you envisage yourself integrating that information from learn into you learning the toolkit? Would you bounce between the CLI and the website? Would you go to learn first and then try it in the CCE? I’m curious how one thing leads to another basically.

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3

When I linked to Learn above, I was specifically pointing to the ‘Reference’ part. While the rest of Learn is great tutorials, the Reference page looks like a technical overview of everything, and I actually sat down and went through each object one by one asking the question “What does it do, and is it interesting to me?”

Obviously some pages answer that question well (without needing parameter lists and the like), and some don’t answer it at all yet. None of them answer the question “Ok, I like this AmpSlice object, how can I try it out?” - and I see that it’s hard to answer that across 4 platforms at once. So a link from each reference page to the corresponding more detailed .rst file would at least let me work through the object in my head a bit more, before actually diving into the CLI / Pure Data / whatever.

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4

Thanks for narrating your experience interacting with it all :slight_smile:

So I kind of see it in two parts:

  1. You “blindly” scour the references seeing what might be interesting. Visual stuff helps, but another level of detail that follows the initial hook is important in going a bit deeper into how you might actually work with the algorithm or what levers it has to pull on?
  2. There needs to be some kind of link into the CCE, a way of understanding where to go from that broader interest.

In regards to 1 that’s something we’re more on the case of already, but for 2 I’m intrigued by this question of how we get people to develop their own trajectories through the resources/patches/etc. Would it be useful if that reference then directly pointed you to other stuff? I did implement the side bar for this reason which has related objects (some of which arent actually existing yet) but would something a bit more discursive about the use be valuable?