PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

Hello, i 've recently heard about csound. Does anyone here has any experience with it? I'm interested about it as a learning tool so to go deeper in synthesis, does it worth it?

the best thing you could do would be to use the modular and buy a real cheap dual trace oscilliscope. being able to see how a square wave reacts while you turn the resonance or cutoff knob on a filter is worth it.

j9k

I've looked into it. To go really deep into it you have to know how to program in C. It seems tedious to me but I haven't looked at any of the new software for it lately.

The Csound programming language is as deep as you want to go. It's also free. But it's SO academic that it's rather uninspiring. A lot of what Csound can do you already have with SCOPE(and it does it better IMHO). Other wacky things that it can do can be achieved with VSTs & standalone Apps(many freeware).

I'll let the pocket protector crowd do the DSP engineering & I'll make the music.

ya, csound isn't really worth the trouble. It has the classic problem. Takes too long to develop anything, and before you know it, the algo becomes the art, and not the music. It does have some really nice functions, and it's fairly fast. But you'd me amazed at how much code you have to write to achieve some of the more mainstream effects.

If you want to look into it further, I'd recommend a version of csound that does realtime. Forgot the name, but search "realtime csound" and you should find it.

I do think max/msp is much simpler and quicker. I always hated how csound's score file worked.

I've been toying around with it since 1996 and imo its occasionally rewarding when plugin stacking and typical synthesis isn't giving me something 'strange' enough...especially rewarding resynthesis and other esoteric things that are less catered for in your average plugin. However the only workflow that makes sense for me is to use it via batchfiles with variables incremented somehow in the batch file, and then careful selection/editing of the results. It also takes a LOT longer to get useful results from than SFP's modular / reaktor / MAXmsp etc. Definately not critical (although you do NOT need to know C and there are ways to convert midi to & from score files etc).

Hm...

According to an article i read in Keyboard in 1995, there were at that time being made research into making a hardware platform available for running cSound in realtime. The article refers to the SHARC processors which would be just the right thing for hosting these unbelievable versatile algorithms. I thought the Scope platform was the result of what the articke suggested ...

Neb

I used csound demo for some time, and i like the granular modules a lot. But after that expired i never think about it. I will get SDK finally... not that i need anything else except the modular...