Chuck, supercollider, and csound are all open source text based audio environments that support ladspa and midi, and different degrees of real-time change in your synth setup. Supercollider is probably the most flexible, chuck is probably the simplest to jump into, and csound is the most mature and most efficient cpu-usage wise, and has reams of existing synth code to look at for examples, and the largest variety of obscure or cutting edge synthesis generators, but it is not as comfortable for real time synth building as the other two (it expects you to design all your synths in "unreal" time, then control them via midi or osc or whatever later, while the others allow modifying or adding synth units or side chains while your synths are running). All three are multi-platform and can interact with other instances over a network, if you ever wanted to make a beowulf synth, or just try using them all working together at once. If you can get over some aspects of csound's design that are tied to it's 1984(?) vintage and musicN lineage (calling synth units "opcodes", having "orchestra" and "score" files, the not-quite-real-time design cycle etc), it is a hard audio environment to beat. On Sat, May 17, 2008 at 12:56 AM, Julien Claassen <julien(a)c-lab.de> wrote: _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user(a)lists.linuxaudio.org http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user