OK, I do have some initial comments/suggestions. I've written a revised opening that conforms to these. I'm not happy about the "make a file with the extension .csd, then edit it" paradigm, because that's now how things happen on any system I'm familiar with. So I've rearranged the text a bit, there. I think emphasizing the 'Orchestra' and 'Score' classical parts of Csound is important, so I've redone those parts, too. See what you think. (Sorry about the first sentence, but I couldn't resist! (:-)) -- Pete -- ------------------ Let's get started with Csound, and make some noise! (Literally at first! We'll get to more musical sounds soon.) A Csound performance has two basic components -- an "Orchestra", or "Instruments" definition, and a "Score", both plain text. These can be separate files, and in some situations this is more convenient, but more commonly they are combined into a "Unified" file with the extension ".csd". In this, the contents of the sections is the same, but they have "tags" in front and behind to identify them. There is an additional initial section that can supply options that would otherwise be needed on the command line. So we'll start by creating a 'csd' file (with any name you wish, but with '.csd' as the extension) using any text editor you are familiar with. This can be used directly in a terminal by typing, if for example your file is called "foo," the following command without the quotes: "csound foo.csd" Another way to manage your .csd file is through an application that allows you to manipulate and test your file, such as QTcsound. There are also other frontend applications for managing Csound files such as Cabbage and Blue. For our initial tutorials, we will stay at the terminal (command line) level. As noted above, the file will have three sections. The first section is the Options section, where you can specify some default parameters, such as audio output, that will be needed to run the performance properly. These can be supplied when you run the file if you prefer, but having defaults here is convenient. The second section is the Instruments Section. This is where we will make our instruments, whether they be made of oscillators, audio samples, or what have you. A typical configuration will have many of these, but we'll start with one. The third section is called the Score Section. This section can be used as a sequencer or even a full-scale instrument score, where notes and their expression can be indicated. Otherwise, this section can be used simply to denote the length you want the instrument to run for, such as 1 hour, 1 day or 1 year. This is used, for example, when you want to use an external MIDI controller to play your instrument live. As with all Csound files, to stop the program just press "ctrl" and "c" and it should stop. Using Csound from the terminal will allow you to see if it has indeed closed correctly, as well as if there were errors during performance. So let's start trying some examples. Copy the following text into your new .csd file: .......... Csound mailing list Csound@listserv.heanet.ie https://listserv.heanet.ie/cgi-bin/wa?A0=CSOUND Send bugs reports to https://github.com/csound/csound/issues Discussions of bugs and features can be posted here