ChucK-in-the-Box is a container-based computer music development environment.
-
Container-based: ChucK-in-the-Box uses Distrobox containers. A Distrobox container can run on most recent Linux hosts. The host runs the Linux kernel, and manages all the devices, processes, and memory. The container runs the application software and has access to both the user's files on the host and its own dedicated files.
The key advantages of containers:
- Efficiency - unlike a full virtual machine, a container's processes are managed directly by the host OS - there's no hypervisor overhead.
- Flexibility - a Distrobox container can use any Linux distribution for which a base image exists. For example, my primary container host is Universal Blue Bluefin, which is based on Fedora Linux, but the ChucK-in-the-Box containers run on Debian 12 or 13 or Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or Ubuntu 25.04.
- Access to host devices and files - like an Appimage or Flatpak, applications in a Distrobox container can show up on the host desktop. But a Distrobox container can export multiple applications instead of being a packaged single application like an Appimage or Flatpak.
-
Computer music development environment: ChucK-in-the-Box contains
- The ChucK ecosystem: ChucK, miniAudicle, ChuGins and ChuGL,
- FluidSynth SoundFont-based tools, and
- The Faust audio programming language.
My main deployment at the moment is on a 2020-vintage gaming PC with an 8-core Intel i7 CPU and an NVIDIA RTX 3090 GPU. I have some experimental builds for a 16 GB Raspberry Pi 5, and ChucK, most of the ChuGins and the miniAudicle seem to be working. However, the ChuGL graphics library is not working on the Pi.
So I'm going to call this release 0.2.5. I have a ChuGL project in the works that I'm going to do using the gaming PC and the fallout from that should take ChucK-in-the-Box to at least 0.7.5. Somewhere in the process I'll be adding some R tools so everything I use is packaged together.