FLTK widgets do not work on Macs due to incompatibility of FLTK with the OS. They may work elsewhere.

I suggest that widgets are best served outside Csound in a host. CsoundQT and Cabbage do the job very well. With Cabbage the added bonus is that you can get plugins and standalones.

That's what most people use these days. 

best

Prof. Victor Lazzarini

Maynooth University

Ireland

On 8 May 2025, at 18:38, Ben McAllister <benmca@gmail.com> wrote:



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Hi all - way back when (2005?) I slapped a FLTK-based front-end on Steven Cook's VCS3 code, MIDI mapped the knobs on a Behringer b-control, and I had a viable VCS3. It's been gathering dust for quite awhile, and I'm keen to modernize it. (https://github.com/benmca/csound-pieces/tree/master/instruments/vcs3)

Questions for you:

- I'm on a Mac M1. Has anyone tried to workaround whatever prompted the note in the plugin repo 6.x README (https://github.com/csound/plugins/tree/develop/6.x#readme)

"widgets (requires the FLTK LIB)
FLTK-based widgets.
NB: These opcodes do not work correctly on MacOS due to incompatibilities with the operating system."

If so, any notes you took would be appreciated. FLTK is my starting point and it would be nice to see where I left off last time I ran this. :)

- I'm leaning towards moving the frontend to Cabbage unless you have other recommendations?

It's funny - the internet is littered with VCS3 emulations of various vintage, but nothing seems maintained except the beautiful ios version. Hopefully a hosted open-source thing will prove useful. Maybe someone knows of a similar project out there - open and vst (or AU or whatever else) compatible?

Even though I theoretically understood all the synthesis techniques involved, playing with a matrix patcher really gave me some intuition I didn't have. I became a better ESQ-1 and JUNO6 programmer after.

Thanks!

--

Ben McAllister | listenfaster.com

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