Opening the FoxDot Editor

Congratulations on getting FoxDot installed – let’s make some sounds! First you need to open SuperCollider so that we can load up sounds from FoxDot. Once SuperCollider opens, type the following into the editor:

FoxDot.start

This tells SuperCollider to start listening for messages from FoxDot. To run this line of code you need put your text cursor on the line and press Ctrl+Return. The line should flash and you should see some numbers turn green in the bottom of your screen:

Now we can open the FoxDot editor and begin making sounds. You can open the editor by going to your command line application (Command Prompt on Windows, Terminal on Mac and Linux) and typing in the following bit of code and pressing enter:

$ python -m FoxDot

This tells your computer to run the Python interpreter and run the FoxDot module as a standalone script. You should be greeted with a window that looks something like this:

Evaluating Code

What you have here is an interactive text editor; you can write code but also run the code within the editor itself. To execute a block of code (lines not separated by blank lines) make sure your text cursor is in the block of code you want to evaluate and press Ctrl+Enter on Windows/Linux or Command+Return on Mac. The text should flash red for a brief moment and be printed to the console on the bottom of the screen like so:

Let’s make a simple noise. Type the following into the FoxDot editor and evaluate it:

p1 >> pluck()

This should start a very basic loop playing one plucked note on repeat. To stop this, add .stop() to the end of the line so it looks like this:

p1 >> pluck().stop()

Evaluate the line to stop the loop. There you go! You’ve made sound with FoxDot – have a look at the rest of the “Getting Started” section to get to grips with other aspects of the environment before moving onto the advanced sections… and have fun!