Beginners: Set up your Development Environment

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What is an SDK and why are we using it?

Think of the AudioStack SDK as a "ready-to-use" kit that comes with all the tools and instructions that you need.

Step 1 - Download an IDE (Integrated Development Environment)

An IDE is a piece of software that allows you to create, edit and run code. If you don't use a development environment already, we recommend using Visual Studio Code, which you can download here.

Step 2 - Install Python3

Once it’s installed, open a new terminal window by clicking on "New Terminal" in the Terminal menu. Then, check if your computer has Python already installed. To do this, type python3 into the terminal window and press enter. If Python3 is successfully installed, you should see a message like this one:

If not, you will need to download it. You can find the latest version here. Complete your installation using the wizard. Once this is complete, run the above command again, to check whether Python3 has been installed successfully.

Step 3 - Set up a Virtual Environment

When working with Python, it's always recommended to set up a virtual environment ("virtualenv") to avoid causing complicated installation problems when you work with SDKs, packages and libraries. Set up a virtualenv when you first start working on a project, and be sure to activate it whenever you return to the project in future.

To set up your virtualenv, open a new terminal window (just like we did in Step 2). Then, type python3 -m venv myFirstAudioStackProject and press enter. If you want to create other environments for new projects in future, you can simply change the name from "myFirstAudioStackProject" to something sensible, and run the same command.

You should activate your virtualenv do each time you open the terminal to start working on your project. To do this, enter the following command into your terminal window and press enter.

Mac/ Linux users: source myFirstAudioStackProject/bin/activate

Windows users: myFirstAudioStackProject\Scripts\activate

Step 4 - Install AudioStack

If you see a message in the terminal window showing your installed version of Python (as above), you can now open a new terminal window. We will use pip to install the AudioStack SDK from the terminal.

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What is pip?

Pip is a common package manager used by Python developers. It allows you to install and update packages (i.e. software) that are not part of Python itself.

To install the SDK, type pip3 install -U audiostack into the terminal window, then press enter. If you receive a message saying AudioStack has been successfully installed, you are now ready to start generating audio.

If you see an error message, for example “command not found”, try going back to Step 2, to make sure that Python3 is installed.

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Congratulations!

You're now ready to get started using the AudioStack API. You'll now be able to run any of the Python code examples in the other sections of the Docs.