[linux-audio-user] Should I Bother Learning Csound?

[Peter Groves]

Hi Everyone,

I'm a long time musician and am starting to get into electronic/computer
music (actual synthesis, up to now I've just been concerned with
recording physical instruments). I've been looking around at all the
complicated things I could learn and have been considering csound. It
seems like it would be the last thing I'd ever need to learn. I also
like that it's based on text files (I'm a programmer by day, and prefer
to do as much as possible in simple tools I already understand). I'm not
sure I would use all of it's features, though. Here's what I think I'd
like to use it for:

-Effects- 
I was thinking it would be nice to use csound filters as LADSPA plugins.
Then I recently saw that someone had started a project doing just that.
Has anyone used this? All that was available was a tarball of the
source, with little documentation. Can you use csound 'effects'
directly, or do you have to write a complicated wrapper to have a
particular effect appear as a proper plugin?

-Instruments-
Can csound instruments be used as midi instruments or maybe soundfonts?
I really don't know how midi, midi instruments, soundfonts, etc work, or
what the differences are, so I don't know if this is even a reasonable
question.

So that's it, I guess. I'd rather do the actual arranging and composing
(of synthesized parts) in something like muse or rosegarden, and be able
to apply effects to 'real' instruments through jack-rack (or something
similar). I think that would be much more flexible than doing it in
csound, as it would be easier, for instance, to change the tempo of all
the tracks of a song at once.

Thanks for any opinions,
Peter