I may be alone with this opinion, but most of the GUI frontends add
little if anything compared to the command line interface, and those
that do (Blue, Cabel, and various plugins for other software like PD,
Max, Cubase, etc.) are available for Csound 5. The GUIs for Csound 4
like Winsound or CsoundAV may look impressive to new users, but do not
in fact add real new functionality, and the built-in editors can be
limited compared for example to vim or emacs with a Csound mode.

On Thursday 23 March 2006 11:16, Victor Lazzarini wrote:

> I say Csound 5 already looks the future of  computer music,
> even if I say it so myself. Apart from the 'base system', there
> are various exciting API projects that are coming onstream.
> 
> Perhaps from a Mac-only perspective it might not immediately
> seem a revolution, but even in that platform it is.  For OSX,
> there are seven different frontends
> already: the csound 5 GUI, csound 5 wish, csoundapi~ (PD), csound~ (MaxMSP),
> CSDPlayer, CsoundXAlpha and csound 'classic' command-line (as
> well as cstclsh, so there are eight), and that does not include John's
> winsound (and also Blue and Cabel, which are not API-based).
> There is no MacCsound with an editor, but I am sure Matt
> will eventually include an editor in his version.
> 
> In any case, editors are plentiful. The most useful of them seems to be
> emacs with the csound modes (it might be an idea to offer an emacs
> package including these modes in CSounds.com).
> 
> At 01:16 22/03/2006, you wrote:
> >Typing commandlines in the Terminal has a sort of nostalgic super
> >user / computer wizard / hacker vibe that a few
> >of my students can totally appreciate, but for most of them...
> >Csound5 looks and feels like a step back in time and
> >not a step forward into the future of computer music...