I was thinking about this discussion recently, and I just have an observation, no solutions. It may be that working with straight text, as some of us do, makes tweaking fine points more cumbersome than using GUIs, but if you think about how composers worked until a hundred years ago or so, writing pieces for orchestras and doing most of the work on a single keyboard or voice, it's still a step up. Their skill lay in knowing the instruments or voices they were working with very well internally; they didn't always need to hear something performed exactly in order to know how to arrange it. I love to do things the hard way, and I always lean towards the idea that, if I spend enough time becoming fluent with something more complicated, rather than relying on something instantly intuitive but more limited, it will pay off in the end. I take this idea to the extreme sometimes. In the area of working with Csound, I tend to restrict myself to Emacs and a Bash shell. I've come up with little minute ways of saving effort here and there, and of testing things and changing them back if I don't like it. By the time I'm done, before I clean it up, my files look like utter chaos, with all kinds of things commented out that didn't work right. So, nothing against the more visual approach, but I feel like typing faster and learning more about the opcodes is the best way to combine power and efficiency (in the long run). Regarding mixing specifically, there are mixer opcodes Mike Gogins contributed, and the zak patch system is really open-ended. It wouldn't be hard to use one or both of these to quickly change between several possibilities to compare them aurally. E.g., if you have two filters, or two versions of the same one, using different control signals, you can have two lines in a row that pipe the output of each into the same mixer channel, or the audio out, and all you have to do to switch quickly between them is comment out the second line. If you later decide to revert, take out the comment. Of course, by the time you get the project smoothed out, comment out or delete anything not being used, but it doesn't hurt to be inefficient with your processor when you're in creative mode. -Chuckk On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 4:43 PM, Jeff Taylor wrote: > A recent discussion on this list about a specific mixing situation with > csound got me thinking a bit about how I make music. > > When writing music I personally like working only with csound (sequencing > and synthesis) and Snd (for analysis and playback). I don't use any > real-time features of csound. I like the simplicity and minimalism this > provides but I find the final stages of mixing very frustrating in this > setup. > > I freely admit that I am not very experienced with mixing and this is likely > much of the problem, but it is, at very least, exacerbated by the fact that > it often takes very long periods of time to hear the results of any changes > made to the code. Small changes and tweaks became very time-prohibitive. > > The track I have on csounds.com ( http://www.csounds.com/node/38 ) is a good > example of the problem. I am not at all happy with the mix on this track. > I think it sounds kind of muffled, I guess, and certain parts are difficult > to hear. I eventually just decided to call it done because it was taking so > long to do anything (several hours for a compile wasn't unusual) and I > wasn't sure what I needed to do to make it sound better, exactly. I don't > think it is an issue with csound itself because I have heard nice sounding > mixes done in csound. > > So how exactly do you all all handle the work flow of doing the final mix > with csound when not working in real-time? Is it just a matter of having a > good idea of what needs to be done ahead of time (i.e. avoid the necessity > of tweaking) or perhaps putting the code together in a certain way to > facilitate the process? Do you just use another application, like a > multitrack with vst plugins? Or is everyone just working in real-time with > csound these days? If it is a matter of just knowing what you are doing, > how did you learn? > > Thanks. > > -- > Electronically, > Jeff Taylor > -- http://www.badmuthahubbard.com