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

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