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

[Paul Winkler]

On Thu, Feb 05, 2004 at 11:35:01AM -0600, Peter Groves wrote:
> 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.

Maybe. IMHO it's a bit of a crap language. SAOL/SASL is much
nicer in a lot of ways - e.g. there is branching other than "goto" :-O
and you can actually make reusable bits of code which is very painful
in csound.  

The selling points of csound are 1) lots of great examples on the net, 
and 2) lots of nice built-in "opcodes". SAOL is way behind on both
of those.

> -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?

dunno. last i heard (years ago) you couldn't do this with csound.
 
> -Instruments-
> Can csound instruments be used as midi instruments

yes.

-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com
Look! Up in the sky! It's HEMI SCORPION!
(random hero from isometric.spaceninja.com)