Re: [linux-audio-dev] Common synthesizer interface -or-, microtonal alternative to MIDI? - Linux-audio-dev

3 May 2005

Hi All,

Just thought I'd mention that my software blue 
(http://www.csounds.com/stevenyi/blue) supports tuning systems with a 
microtonal piano roll that reads in Scala 
files(http://csounds.com/stevenyi/blue/blueDocs/html/pianoRoll.html), 
and is somewhat like a sequencer application (mixing of SCO fragments, 
SCO generation scripts in python and javascript, etc.).  It's built for 
use with csound and is GPL.  Although I'm not sure if blue is in the 
same vein as what the original poster of this thread is looking to 
build, I thought it might be something worth checking out, perhaps 
simply for ideas on possible ways to implement (or not to implement) a 
solution.

Also, I know that newer versions of Apple's Logic sequencer do support a 
limited degree of alternate tunings (can not find info on it on Apple's 
site at the moment).

steven

...
 Alfons Adriaensen wrote:

 On Tue, May 03, 2005 at 08:36:29AM -0400, Dave
Phillips wrote:

 Considering its suitability for microtonality, why
not design 
something around Csound ?

From the origianl post: 

>The problem is that I don't know of any software synthesizer that is:
>
>1. good enough for decent music production;
>
>      
> Well, Csound is being used for just that purpose. Perhaps the original 
poster should check out recent traffic on the Csound mail lists.

 >2. easy to use by non-experts (this is a
direct stab at CSound, or
>  better at its lack of a decent GUI, of a standard instrument exchange
>  file format and of a decent, centalized library of presets)
>
>      
> Csound has no integral GUI, sorry. It does have a set of FLTK-based GUI 
widgets which lets you create your own GUI.

The Csound orc file has been and still is the way Csounders exchange 
instruments. There are in fact a number of instrument libraries out 
there. I think the original poster might not be quite up to date on Csound.

 >3. free software.
>   
>
>      
> Csound is LGPL and has been for some time now.

 To add my 0.02 Euro : I'm sure that OSC is the
way to go for this project.
And I'd love to have an 'OSC sequencer' -- something that allows you to
schedule / edit / manipulate arbitrary OSC events, and with a non-destructive
region editor similar to Ardour's.

 Sounds cool, I'd like to see that too.

Btw, Rocky was a project with somewhat similar goals, a sequencer for 
22-tone ET, using Csound for its rendering engine and Java for its GUI. 
Alas, Rocky appears to have disappeared. [Insert obligatory Sylvester 
Stallone joke here].

Best,

dp