To begin playing around with TidalCycles, you first need to start the Supercollider server, the SuperDirt synthesizer, and the TidalCycles server. The process for starting these will depend on which environment you are using (e.g. are you using the Sclang IDE (ScIDE), Atom, Emacs?). At this point, we are assuming you have setup whatever environment you will be using.

1. start sclang server
2. execute SuperDirt.start command on sclang server to start the SuperDirt synth
3. start tidalcycles server

Sometimes when you try starting the SuperDirt synth, Supercollider may not be able to find it. This is most likely because the directory where the synth has been downloaded is not in Supercollider's search path. First, find where the synth has been downloaded (if you are using quarks, which is the Supercollider package manager, it may be somewhere like /local/share/SuperCollider/downloaded-quarks or something). Then, execute

sclang> Quarks.addFolder("path/to/my/downloaded-quarks/or/synth")

in order to add that path to the search.