Glossary

add action

An action number that defines the insertion behavior of a node.

audio rate

The sampling rate of the server.

asynchronous command

Commands performed by the server outside the real time thread. Asynchronous commands send a reply to the registered clients when the task is completed.

block size

The size, in samples, of the control rate processing interval of the server.

buffer

Dynamically allocated memory in the server used to store audio data. Buffers are used to load audio files and may have different sample rates. See Buffer.

bus

A server bus used to connect ugens in different synth nodes. Server’s buses are global and ugens write or read from them in the order defined by their position in the node tree.

completion message

An OSC message sent as a binary blob to some asynchronous server commands. These messages are evaluated after the task of the command is finished.

control rate

The rate introduced by csound to perform less computation for signals that don’t require sample rate accuracy. It’s used to reduce the CPU load.

default group

A server group created by the client application after the server is booted. Default group ID is always 1 and is the user default target group.

demand rate

A control or audio rate signal that changes at frequency defined by demand ugens. See Demand.

done action

An action performed in the server by certain ugens when finish. Done actions can free or pause server nodes relative to the ugen that fires it. See Done.

elapsed time

In real time is the physical time in seconds since the library start. In non real time is the total time in seconds advanced by routines playing on clocks.

group

A group in the server tree. See Group.

initial rate

An special rate that computes values only at initialization.

logical time

The time as measured by Routine instances. Logical time is measured in deterministic interval and is not affected by jitter as physical time. It’s used to precisely define the timetag for OSC bundles.

multichannel expansion:

Because SuperCollider represents multiple channels as lists of ugens, when an ugen receives a list of values for one or more of its input arguments the constructor returns a ChannelList object containing one ugen instance for each element in the longest list instead of a single ugen. The shortest lists are wrapped to fit the length of the longest and passed in order to the different instances, scalar values are kept as the argument of each new instance. This special behavior, along with the operations over lists of channels, is a convenient way to expand graphs and maintain a simple representation by avoiding loops.

node

A server tree node. See Node.

physical time

The time as measured by the computer’s system clock. When used as wait time is subject to jitter, it depends on non deterministic processing time between calls and is affected by NTP adjustments.

quark

A SuperCollider extension library written in sclang.

root node

The root node group of a server’s node tree. The id of the root node is always 0. See RootGroup.

sclang

The original language of SuperCollider.

scsynth

The original server of SuperCollider.

supernova

An new alternative implementation of the server with SIMD capabilities and parallel group processing.

synth

A synthesis node. See Synth.

synthdef

A synthesis definition composed of ugens used to create synth nodes. See SynthDef.

timetag

An OSC-timetag. It’s the time at which bundled instructions are scheduled to be executed in the server. Although the term is used to refer to the time of bundles, within the library time is measured in seconds (or beats for TempoClock) relative to elapsed time and is converted to the actual timetag representation when sent.

trigger

An impulsive signal that is created when the value of a bus goes from being less than or equal to to being greater than zero.

trigger rate

A control rate signal that behaves like an impulse, when set to a value it returns to zero immediately after.

ugen

A sound synthesis processing unit.

wire buffer

An internal connection between two ugens. Number of wires is defined at boot time.