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Required Prerequisites

There's a few things to install as part of a complete tidal system:

Git
Haskell
SuperCollider
Atom Editor (if you don't like the atom editor for some reason, please check out the list of alternatives)

Hopefully your Linux distribution makes the pre-requisites easily available to you via a package manager. For example, if you are using recent version of Ubuntu or similar, you can install Haskell with the following command in a terminal window:

sudo apt-get install build-essential cabal-install git jackd2

Install Supercollider

Installing supercollider via this method (i.e. sudo apt-get install supercollider sc3-plugins) generally doesn't work. Either the supercollider version is too old (superdirt needs at least version 3.7), or the version of supercollider is mismatched with sc3-plugins. If you're using ubuntu, mint or a similar distribution, my advice is to ignore the supercollider packages and just compile them yourself. Instructions for compiling from source on various distros is available here. On Wsl you may want to build SuperCollider without Qt as you won't use GUI anyway. If you're using a recent Debian-based distro (for example, Ubuntu >= 18.04), these scripts make it easy to do so:

 https://github.com/lvm/build-supercollider

Just paste in the four commandline instructions under "How to?" in turn (you can ignore the bit about 'the debian way')

Optional Prerequisites

(This section can be ignored if in the previous section ‘Install Supercollider’ you have decided to execute the scripts in https://github.com/lvm/build-supercollider since those scripts already contain the installation of the sc3-plugins through ‘$ sh build-sc3-plugins.sh')

The following is optional, but recommended:

SC3 Plugins - you may need the SuperCollider sc3-plugins if you want to use any of the synths included in SuperDirt. Most of the examples in the documentation will still work, so you could skip this step and return to it later.

Install TidalCycles

Open a Terminal. If you’re unsure how to open a terminal window in Linux, it varies according to distribution but generally find “Terminal” in the menus. Then type and run these two commands (ignoring any complaints that cabal has of 'legacy v1 style of usage'):

cabal update
cabal install tidal --lib

-- note: as of version 1.7 instead you'll have to use the following commands:
cabal v1-update
cabal v1-install tidal

If you've never installed TidalCycles before, then the cabal install tidal step may take some time. At the end of the command output, it should say Installed tidal-x.x.x (where x.x.x is the latest version number) without any errors.

Install SuperDirt

TidalCycles is meant to run on top of SuperDirt, so you will have to run it first to make sound. Here's how to install it.

Start SuperCollider IDE (to start the ide through a terminal type ‘scide’), and in the editor window paste in the following line of code:

Quarks.checkForUpdates({Quarks.install("SuperDirt", "v1.7.2"); thisProcess.recompile()})

Run the code by clicking on it, to make sure the cursor is on this line, then hold down Shift and press Enter.

It'll take a while to install. You'll see something like the following:

Installing SuperDirt
Installing Vowel
Vowel installed
Installing Dirt-Samples
Dirt-Samples installed
SuperDirt installed
compiling class library...
...
(then some blah blah, and finally, something like:)
...

*** Welcome to SuperCollider 3.10.0. *** For help press Ctrl-D.

Using the SuperCollider interpreter in a terminal

You can also install it using the terminal interpreter. You might want to get familiar with it if you prefer using your own text editor. There are great SuperCollider integration plugins available for Emacs, Vim or Atom.

To start the interpreter just run sclang in a terminal, then just paste the command line from above and press Enter to run it. Once the installation is done, you can exit the interpreter by pressing Ctrl + C.

Install editor extensions

TidalCycles was made to be run in an interactive environment. The way to do it is to get a text editor and install an extension for it. Here's a list of extensions you might want to try:

Instructions: Atom Extension

Start Atom, and install the TidalCycles plugin. You can find it via the menus under edit > settings/preferences > install, then typing “tidalcycles” into the search box. Once that’s installed, restart atom.

Instructions: Emacs Extension

A MELPA package is provided for TidalCycles integration within Emacs. You must first make sure you have MELPA installed on your machine (here are the instructions; basically modifying your init.el or .emacs files with the first code snippet and then executing M-x package-refresh-contents in Emacs; Here some keyring update information if it fails to verify signature after running the last command) then simply run M-x package-install <return> tidal <return>. For more information or troubleshooting check the Emacs page

This extension provides a major mode for *.tidal files. Once the package is installed, you can just open a Tidal script and press C-c C-s to start Tidal in Emacs, then C-return to run the statement under your cursor.

Test Your Installation

Now you are ready to Start TidalCycles and SuperDirt for the first time.

Installation Troubleshooting

Supercollider run on a Jack audio server in order to deliver sound to your speakers. If you see in Supercollider's Post Window a error

Couldn't set realtime scheduling priority 1: Operation not permitted

you'll need to setup Jack with the command sudo dpkg-reconfigure jackd2 and add your username to the audio group with sudo addgroup -username- audio (with your Linux username instead of -username-).

You can check if your username is already in the audio group by typing the command groups -username-. You may need to log out and log back in for this to take effect.

More Troubleshooting in Troubleshooting a Tidal installation

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