Hello!

T. Azimuth Schwitters · Joined: Dec 19, 2009 Posts: 8 Location: Madison, WI

Just checking to see if anyone on the planet still uses Csound. There used to be such a robust community.

yerpa58 · Posted: Tue Dec 22, 2009 10:15 am Post subject:

I have an OLPC (or LOLPC, as I call it) that has a nice program called Synth Lab that I believe is based on csound. I would like to find the Synth Lab source so I could see how it connects to csound, but no luck so far. I would be interested in finding a good overview of the current csound source code. I have also subscribed to the MIT Press Computer Music Journal in the past, there have been a few articles on csound.

csound is very powerful, and seems to run pretty well on the 400 MHz chip in the LOLPC.

T. Azimuth Schwitters · Joined: Dec 19, 2009 Posts: 8 Location: Madison, WI

Even on the forums at Csounds.com there is little to no activity. I'm concerned that I'm spending a great deal of time learning a doomed technology.

yerpa58 · Posted: Tue Dec 22, 2009 12:15 pm Post subject:

You probably want to check out the ChucK programming language. Many aspects seem similar to csound.

T. Azimuth Schwitters · Joined: Dec 19, 2009 Posts: 8 Location: Madison, WI

Already learning it.

I don't see them as highly similar. Csound seems more appropriate for composition, ChucK for live performance.

Some things about ChucK bother me, like the fact that it's crash-prone, and (at first glance) there isn't a note off command. There also seems to be a bit less configurability.

I do like it for various other reasons, though.

Antimon · Posted: Wed Dec 23, 2009 1:07 am Post subject:

Yeah, ChucK is young. I sense a problem with fragmentation between these programming languages - there isn't a large enough user base to support decent communities for all of them. As they go in and out of fashion, knowledge drains from the old and fills up in the new.

I can't help wondering where you're looking for a note off command in ChucK, but that seems like a discussion for the ChucK forum. Smile

/Stefan

dewdrop_world · Posted: Fri Dec 25, 2009 8:53 am Post subject:

ninly · Joined: Feb 18, 2010 Posts: 1 Location: Huntsville, AL

I've been learning and using csound for my project, although I'm nowhere near adept enough as a programmer (or even as a composer) to really participate in the development community.

I very much appreciate csound as a technology and medium, though.

herrsteiner · Joined: Mar 10, 2008 Posts: 8 Location: Hamburg

I still love to use Csound and it is very active, with recent updates. And due to its open source status it cant die anyway, unlike closed source (SoundDiver anyone?). I see regularly some keyfigures on conferences. The Csound community happens in the mailing list.