stenophone VS Pilot

Personally I've never been attracted to writing SuperCollider code, especially not in a live context, largely due to its syntax, but also its complexity.

So-called 'visual programming languages' I don't find interesting for performance, since they rely on the mouse for program manipulation.

For me Tidal's mini-notation is the greatest music sequencing tool of all time, bar none. Every time someone shows me a sequencer I can usually write the Tidal code in my head on the spot, and save $1000s on redundant hardware. It could only be beaten by being turned into a physical instrument, something I've tried to do in the past: https://github.com/jarmitage/Stenophone.

That being said, even though I'm evidently a big Tidal fan I would still call attention to ICLC and HLCI, where amazingly creative and interesting new systems and approaches are being proposed every year:

https://iclc.toplap.org/

https://hybrid-livecode.pubpub.org/

Mirabai Knight's talk about this is one of my all time faves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpv-Qb-dB6g

Inspired me to try to create a live coding musical instrument based on it: https://github.com/jarmitage/stenophone / https://iclc.toplap.org/2017/cameraReady/stenophone_camready...

I'm completely new to all of this and would like to learn ORCA. Right now, I'm looking for an easy-to-use syntesizer, so I can convert the MIDI-Events to sound. I've already tried Pilot, which was designed for ORCA, but it is very buggy for me. I also tried VCVRack, but I just want pre-made instruments, one for each MIDI-channel, which is very tedious to do there. FluidSynth didn't recognize the MIDI-Input at all.

So, I'd like to learn ORCA, but as far as I understood it needs additional software for it to work. I've already tried VCVRack, SunVox and Pilot, but none of them worked for me (Because I have no idea how to use them). I couldn't find any easy beginners guide on how to set everything up. I already know the basics about MIDI and music theory. Also, I'm doing this all on Linux.