Here! Here!

Jim, I hope you can do this. Your journalist/editorial skills would be 
tremendously helpful - especially to beginners.

Many of us are concerned about exactly what you are talking about.

Go for it - and developers, please support Jim in this.

Art Hunkins

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jim Aikin" 
To: 
Sent: Monday, March 24, 2008 9:05 PM
Subject: [Csnd] Re: Csound Music Archive


> from Michael Rhoades:
>
>> Really... the only limitation with Csound is your own imagination.
>> Though I work almost exclusively with spreadsheets on the score
>> synthesis aspects of composing, being the anal retentive person I
>> am, there are nearly infinite other ways you can work with it.
>>
>> The idea is to find your own way(s) to make beautiful music in
>> whatever manner works for you... that is the beauty of Csound,
>> everyone who uses it to compose does so in a manner unique to
>> their own sensibilities.
>
> The last time I tried using Csound, a couple of years ago, I ended up 
> mentioning to Dr. B that I thought that tag line (about the only 
> limitation being your imagination) ought to be amended to read, "The only 
> limitation with Csound is your own patience." Imagination I have plenty 
> of; patience is sometimes in short supply, and composing music in a text 
> editor will tend to push it to the limit.
>
> I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say, "there are nearly 
> infinite other ways you can work with it." If I want to draw on paper 
> using crayons, scan the drawings, and then ... no, that probably isn't 
> going to get me anywhere.
>
> I actually got a couple of notes out of blue this afternoon, while sitting 
> at the coffee shop with old Bob Dylan tracks on the P.A. system leaking in 
> through the headphones. blue seems to offer some real promise as a front 
> end, and I'm looking forward to exploring it. But I think even Steven 
> would probably agree that it falls well short of "infinite."
>
> If I were 20 years old and had nothing to do but sit around the dorm room 
> until 4 in the morning writing C++ code for Linux, I would be able to get 
> incrementally closer to "infinite." I could even write a program to 
> translate those scanned crayon drawings into .sco files. But as a 
> practical matter, I have too many other things I'd like to be doing, and 
> not enough hours in the week to do them all. So I have to rely on other 
> people to devise cool tools.
>
> Part of my role as journalist/gadfly is to whine when the existing tools 
> give me headaches. I sometimes forget to reassure people that it's _not_ 
> that I think the existing tool -- in this case, Csound -- is bad or 
> deficient! It's just that I'm hoping for a level of user-friendliness that 
> I think is probably achievable, but that is not yet implemented.
>
> --Jim Aikin
>
>
>
>
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