Remote TidalCycles jamming setup

Prerequisits

• You'll need a server with admin previliges.
• Both ends (the computer running tidal and the computer running SC) should have socat installed.

Here's the overall process:

• Prepare the server
• Create an SSH reverse tunnel from the server to the laptop running SC
• Convert TCP messages back to UDP on the laptop running SC
• Send the UDP messages from the laptop running tidal to the server
• Start tidal
• Stream the audio back to the tidal user

Prepare the server

For a server we created a droplet on digital ocean. There's almost no setup for the droplet, so we can create one for jamming and delete it later to keep the cost low.

The only configuration needed on the server is to change the SSH settings on the server to allow forwarded ports to bind to the wildcard address (meaning that the address will be publicly accessible) [1].

Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and add:

GatewayPorts yes

Now reload the SSH settings on the server with

systemctl reload ssh.service

Note the IP of your server and use it everywhere that SERVER_IP is mentioned below.

Create an SSH reverse tunnel from the server to the laptop running SC

SSH tunnelling doesn't support UDP, so we'll create a tunnel for TCP and convert the UDP messages sent by tidal to TCP on one machine, and back to UDP on the other machine.

On the machine that runs SC run

ssh -R 12345:localhost:12345 root@SERVER_IP

The port doesn't really matter, 12345 is used here for convenience.

Convert TCP messages back to UDP on the laptop running SC

socat TCP-LISTEN:12345,fork UDP4:localhost:57120

Send the UDP messages from the laptop running tidal to the server

socat UDP-LISTEN:57120,fork TCP4:SERVER_IP:12345

Start tidal

Spin up tidal on one side, SC on the other side, put some patterns in and it should work, almost! The user on the SC side will probably notice that the timing is not super stable and there are warnings about that in the SC log. This is a result of the network latency. To fix that, increase tidal's latency. If you're using atom go to preferences > open config folder. This brings up the tidal source code. In tidalcycles/lib/boot.tidal, change the oLatency value to 0.4 or so in this line of code:

tidal <- startTidal (superdirtTarget {oLatency = 0.4, oAddress = "127.0.0.1", oPort = 57120}) (defaultConfig {cFrameTimespan = 1/20})

A value of 0.4 worked for us. If it's still too low try to increase the value until there's no more jitter and warnings in the log.

Stream the audio back to the tidal user

So now the live coder's music is coming from the laptop running SC. In our case, one audio channel from SC is an analog clock to sync the hardware sync. The other channels from SC, and the hardware synth, are connected to a mixer and the entire mix can now be heard on the SC end of the system. But the live coder cannot hear anything yet. We used a 2nd computer that takes mixer's output and streams it back to the live coder over zoom.

The entire system looks something like this. The area in blue is for the laptop running tidal and the area in pink is the SC + hardware synth end of the system.

Advice on testing things locally

If you want to test things on a single computer make sure to change the port SC is listening to. Otherwise you are trying to use the same port twice: once listening to tidal and sending the messages to the server, and again listening to the messages coming from the server. To do so, start the SuperDirt synth in SC as follows:

SuperDirt.start(port: 57121)

You'll also have to change the port that the TCP stream is converted to, so replace

socat TCP-LISTEN:12345,fork UDP4:localhost:57120

with

socat TCP-LISTEN:12345,fork UDP4:localhost:57121

Enjoy jamming and keep safe!

Footnotes