Troubleshooting Issues

DISCLAMER: IN NO EVENT shall the authors of this wiki page or the core team be liable for any damages arising from following any suggestions or instructions on this wiki page.

Also, while we hope this page is helpful, these are only suggestions and are not guaranteed to solve your issue.

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Doesn't work? Where to look for clues:

If you have trouble with Sonic Pi, have a look at the logs. You will find the log files in your user home directory in ~/.sonic-pi/log/. Most likely, you will find a helpful error message there.

Here is a list of some potential solutions to a few common problems.

Ports unavailable

It seems like some of the ports that Sonic Pi needs are being used by other processes/programs. This could mean that processes relating to Sonic Pi is open, or other programs are using those ports.

The ports that Sonic Pi uses are ports 4556 to 4562:

• 4556 - Scsynth port
• 4556 - Scsynth send port
• 4557 - Server OSC listen port
• 4557 - GUI OSC out port
• 4558 - Server OSC out port
• 4558 - GUI OSC listen port
• 4559 - Server incoming OSC cues port
• 4560 - Erlang router port
• 4561 - OSC MIDI out port
• 4562 - OSC MIDI in port

Suggestions to try to solve this:

1. Firstly, make sure Sonic Pi or Supercollider aren't already running!

2. Next, you can try to close other Sonic Pi related processes:

   Note: Be very careful what processes you close, make sure you don’t close any processes that are critical to the system, or processes of another app you're doing some work on.

   If you're on Raspbian, macOS or Linux open the System Monitor; or if you're on Windows open the Task Manager (press Win+r, type 'taskmgr', and press enter)...

   and try closing the following processes:

   • beam.smp
   • Erlang
   • Ruby Interpreter
   • Sonic Pi
   • Sonic Pi Portable Launcher
   • Supercollider
   • scsynth
   • m2o
   • o2m

3. If that doesn't work, try to find out what processes are using the ports and close those processes (if it's safe to do so):

   Note: Be very careful what processes you close, make sure you don’t close any processes that are critical to the system, or processes of another app you're doing some work on.

   On Raspbian, macOS or Linux:

   • To find the processes that are using the ports, open the Terminal and type lsof -n -i:4556,4557,4558,4559,4560,4561,4562.
   • Check what those processes are (make sure they aren’t important processes that are critical to the system, or processes of another app you're doing work on), then if it’s safe to do so, you can stop those processes by typing kill [Process ID].

   On Windows:

   • Open the Command Prompt (press Win+r, type 'cmd' and press enter) and typing: netstat -a -b -n -o. This will display a list of some processes with the ports they're using. Look through the list to find any processes that are using the ports that Sonic Pi needs.
   • Check what those processes are (make sure they aren’t important processes that are critical to the system, or processes of another app you're doing work on), then if it’s safe to do so, you can stop those processes from the Task Manager, or via. the Command Prompt by typing taskkill /PID [Process ID].

Linux: There is no sound with use_synth :piano

You probably didn't install the SC3 plugins package for SuperCollider on your system. If there is no binary package provided by your distribution, you can install it from source.

Linux: Trouble with JACK

If the GUI complains that "The Sonic Pi server could not be started!" or the message "Loading previous buffer contents. Please wait..." does not disappear from your buffers after startup, the most likely reason is a problem with JACK.

The Linux version of Sonic Pi relies on the JACK audio connection kit for its audio output and it needs to be installed with it. The jackd audio daemon needs to be started in the background and if it isn't running already, the Sonic Pi server will start it for you. If this fails, Sonic Pi never finishes starting up and won't get ready for you.

As a workaround, try this:

• be sure that you have closed Sonic Pi
• start jackd manually using the qjackctl GUI
• once it started, start sonic-pi again

Sonic Pi contributor @rbnpi has described a working configuration to workaround problems starting JACK.

On Linux distributions using PulseAudio, starting JACK may interfere with the applications using sound that were running already, e.g. Firefox will stop playing audio once JACK starts. There is a guide on how to configure JACK with PulseAudio to avoid this.