Estuary is a platform for collaboration and learning through live coding. It enables you to create sound, music, and visuals in a web browser. Key features include:
- built-in tutorials and reference materials
- a growing collection of different interfaces and live coding languages
- support for networked ensembles (whether in the same room or distributed around the world)
- text localization to an expanding set of natural languages
- visual customization via themes (described by CSS)
The development of Estuary is the result of ongoing collaborative work that has been supported by two grants from Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) - initially for the project "Projectional interfaces for musical live coding", and more recently as part of the project "Platforms and practices for networked, language-neutral live coding". Estuary builds upon, and depends on, the work of many others, including but not limited to all those who contribute to Reflex, TidalCycles, and other languages and projects. Estuary is free and open source software, released under the terms of the GNU Public License (version 3).
You don't need to install or build anything to start using Estuary - you can just point your web browser to an existing deployment of it, and start making things! Please note that Chrome or Chromium are REQUIRED browsers for use with Estuary (you will almost certainly have problems if you try to use other browsers at this time). At the time of writing, a stable, recent version of Estuary is online 24/7 at a test server belonging to the research group at McMaster University that is working on Estuary - you can try it out anytime at the following URL (and if you have questions take them either to the #estuary channel on talk.lurk.org or the "estuary" Google group): https://estuary.mcmaster.ca
If you do want to build Estuary from source yourself, please refer to the instructions in BUILDING.md. Note that building Estuary depends on a rather complex tool-chain and can be time-consuming. Don't hesitate to reach out on the lurk or Google group channels mentioned above for assistance.