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SOUL_FAQ.md

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  • What is SOUL?

    You might want to read the project overview.

  • Who created SOUL?

    SOUL was first dreamt-up by Julian Storer at ROLI/JUCE in 2016, and announced publicly at ADC2018. Its initial beta release was in November 2019.

  • What is the project status?

    SOUL is a long-term multi-year project that consists of a number of sub-projects.

    • Language spec - the SOUL language is stable, and at a V1.0 status. Although we'll add more features in future versions, it'll mainly be syntactic sugar and we don't expect any major changes to the basic language.
    • Compiler - the SOUL command-line tool is at a V1.0 status. As well as transpiling SOUL to other languages, it can run patches in its JIT engine, run tests, generate documentation and perform various other tasks.
    • Core library - a range of basic DSP building blocks are available, and we'll be continually adding and updating the library content.
    • SOUL Patch Format - the SOUL patch format is at a V1.0 status. It may be updated in future to add new features.
    • soul.dev website - the SOUL website has been running as a simple playground since 2018. We plan to add extensive new features to the site to turn it into a very powerful development portal.
    • Network Venue Support - A goal for SOUL is to allow it to be run remotely across any kind of network. This is work-in-progress, with our network protocol expected to be public around mid-2021.
    • Target Devices - it's still early days for our support of processors other than Intel/ARM, but this is on the roadmap.

  • How can I write some SOUL code?

    The easiest way is to try the web playground at soul.dev You can also load and live-code SOUL patches using the latest versions of Tracktion Waveform You can also compile and play patches using the command-line tools

  • Where can I find more technical details?

    The project website is at soul.dev. This repository has various other guides in the docs folder. You can look at some of the source code in this repository

  • Where can I give feedback, get help, or discuss the project?

    Until we set up a dedicated forum, the best public forum for discussing SOUL is probably the JUCE forum, where the team are available to answer questions.

  • What is the licensing/business model?

    Our intention is to make SOUL entirely free and unencumbered for developers to use. All our public source code is permissively (ISC) licensed. We're currently keeping some of our secret sauce closed-source, but the EULA allows use of it freely to encourage its adoption in 3rd party hardware and software. Ultimately, we plan to commercialise SOUL by licensing back-end drivers and other IP for use by vendors who are building SOUL-compatible hardware products.