[linux-audio-dev] Common synthesizer interface -or- microtonal alternative to MIDI?

[Dave Phillips]

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