SuperCollider is by far the most difficult program described in the Fedora Musicians' Guide. The SuperCollider applications themselves are easy to use, and they work very well, but they are merely tools to help you accomplish something useful. SuperCollider has an extremely powerful and flexible programming language, with libraries designed primarily for audio processing. As often happens with computers, however, this added flexibility and power comes at the cost of requiring greater understanding and learning on the part of the user. Because SuperCollider involves actual programming, a rudimentary understanding of some principles and concepts of computer science will provide huge benefits to somebody learning the language. The following articles from Wikipedia are not mandatory reading, but you should refer to them as necessary while learning the language.

SuperCollider uses the JACK Audio Connection Kit. You should install JACK before installing SuperCollider. Refer to Section 2.3.1, “Install and Configure JACK” for instructions to install JACK.

SuperCollider is not available from the Fedora software repositories. You must enable the "Planet CCRMA at Home" repository to install SuperCollider. See Section 4.3.1, “Install the "Planet CCRMA at Home" Software Repository” for instructions ti enable the "Planet CCRMA at Home" repository. The "Planet CCRMA at Home" repository contains a wide variety of music and audio applications.

You need an audio interface to use SuperCollider. You do not need a microphone to use SuperCollider.

The SuperCollider packages are all held in the Planet CCRMA at Home repository, and there are a lot of them. Many of them have standard Fedora suffixes, but many are other kinds of optional components. Most of the optional features add libraries to SuperCollider, allowing you to use them in your audio programs. The specific features available in each additional package are not described here.

If you have never used SuperCollider before, then we recommend installing the smallest number of packages possible. This will allow you to start learning with the core classes, available on all SuperCollider installations. Installing the bare minimum requirements will not prevent you from installing optional libraries in the future, of course.

The recommended installation also avoids installing the emacs or vim components, which - unless you are already a programmer - you probably don't know how to use. The emacs and vim text editors are extremely powerful and extensible, but they can be difficult to learn. Furthermore, there's no reason to learn them just for SuperCollider, because the component for GEdit is more than sufficient.

To install the minimum recommended installation for SuperCollider: