Jim,  

    It would be much easier to answer this question if you posted the .csd and/or the compiler output with your question.  There are about 18 million possible things that could be going wrong.  Being that Csound is based in programming, debugging is a major part of the process, but in order to debug a situation, as much information as possible is necessary.  It could be as simple as a syntax error.  You mentioned that you edited the .csd.  It's highly possible that you accidentally insert an extra character.  In the three years or so that I have been working on learning Csound, I've done that at least four hundred times myself.  There also could be something wrong with your midi setup, which would show up in the compiler output, specifically if you have the message output set correctly.  I know that's introducing another aspect of Csound, "a message flag", that you may not have learned yet, but that's a part of Csound.  There is a lot to learn, and it
 takes time. 
    
    I've been reading your question threads and keeping to myself because I'm not a highly experienced user, but now I've chosen to input.  It sounds like there is a drive to create a "Csound for Dummies" type document/site.  I think the major flaw with this idea is that Csound is NOT for Dummies.  It is a highly sophisticated programming language used to realize high level concepts of synthesis, analysis, and composition.  Basically, I feel that no part of Csound is a beginner concept.  When I came to Csound, I was first taken aback by it's complexity, but by using some of the skills that I already had, I was able to sift through it all and eventually figure things out.  Although I had a skill set revolving around music and it's technical aspects, I had no experience in programming.  Gaining the required programming knowledge took some work, It also took a lot of trial and error, determination, and the ability to seek out information via the web. I
 found myself frequently asking questions on the list as well as utilizing Wikipedia to research concepts I was unfamiliar with.  In the end, it was my desire to make use of such a powerful program that got me through to where I am now, which involves linking wiimotes and dancers' movements to create sounds triggered and synthesized in Csound.  

    Yes, there are things that the Csound community could do to make the journey of a newbie smoother, but I don't feel that it will ever be easy. 

     The info is out there if a person wants to learn it.  When the pupil is ready, the teacher will arise.  

                                                       Mark Jamerson 

 
----- Original Message ----
From: Jim Aikin 
To: csound@lists.bath.ac.uk
Sent: Wednesday, June 4, 2008 4:55:59 PM
Subject: [Csnd] Re al-Time MIDI Input


I'm attempting to get real-time MIDI input to Csound in Windows, and it's not
working.

As noted in earlier threads, I'm working on a magazine article on Csound,
and I'd love to be able to report that I actually got it working. I've
pretty much given up on CsoundVST, which as far as I can see simply doesn't
work in my computer, but I'm still hopeful about stand-alone real-time
operation.

The page on "Real-time MIDI Support" in the manual is not helpful. It
immediately tosses in several items that I don't understand.

Michael Gogins's tutorial has a clearly written section on real-time MIDI in
Windows, but the instructions in that section don't work for me. I've loaded
the .csd he recommends (CsoundVST-nomixer.csd), added the code he suggests
in the tutorial, and, after a bit of wrangling, managed to get my MIDI input
port configured correctly. (I happen to need to use port 9, not 0, which
meant I had to edit the .csd a bit more.)

But when I hit the play button in the Csound5gui, "playback" starts and
stops immediately, without waiting for any MIDI notes to arrive.

What am I doing wrong? Suggestions would be welcome.

--Jim Aikin

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mark jamerson wrote:
> 
>     It would be much easier to answer this question if you posted the .csd
> and/or the compiler output with your question. 
> 
In general, of course you're right. However, in this particular case, the
file Michael recommends in the tutorial (CsoundVST-nomixer.csd) is one
that's distributed with Csound. You'll find it in the Examples folder. I
should of course have mentioned that.


mark jamerson wrote:
> 
> You mentioned that you edited the .csd.  It's highly possible that you
> accidentally insert an extra character. 
> 

The usual result of that is that it won't compile. In this case it did. In
any event, we're further along in the toubleshooting process now. The
problem (which was very obvious once it was pointed out to me) was that I
needed to edit the file even more. Michael's tutorial failed to point out
that in order to get real-time performance, the score has to contain this
type of line:

f0 3600

So ultimately, it was a bug in the tutorial -- a simple one that I could
have figured out for myself if I had stopped to think about it for a minute.


mark jamerson wrote:
> 
>     I've been reading your question threads and keeping to myself because
> I'm not a highly experienced user, but now I've chosen to input.  It
> sounds like there is a drive to create a "Csound for Dummies" type
> document/site.  I think the major flaw with this idea is that Csound is
> NOT for Dummies.  It is a highly sophisticated programming language used
> to realize high level concepts of synthesis, analysis, and composition. 
> Basically, I feel that no part of Csound is a beginner concept.
> 

I basically agree with your characterization of Csound. And I totally agree
that work (lots of work) will be required for anyone to master it.

But there are other factors rambling along in the back of my mind, which
perhaps I should make explicit.

First, I'm a big supporter of making cool tools available to musicians, and
free tools especially. Most musicians are poor! A system that lets people do
sophisticated things without spending piles of money is something I feel
EVERY musician who uses a computer needs to know about.

Second, the Csound documentation is _not_ as clear or explanatory as it
could or should be. Now, I understand that all of the docs are prepared by
unpaid volunteers, and that one shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.
But if a musician gives up in bafflement because some feature of Csound (or
more likely, five or six features) wasn't explained clearly, we all lose.
The Csound community loses that musician, and his or her potential audience
loses the experience of some cool music that will never get recorded.


mark jamerson wrote:
> 
>     Yes, there are things that the Csound community could do to make the
> journey of a newbie smoother, but I don't feel that it will ever be easy. 
> 
>      The info is out there if a person wants to learn it.  When the pupil
> is ready, the teacher will arise.  
> 

There are a lot of young people who can't afford to attend "public"
universities in California (where I happen to live), or who can't get the
classes they need in order to graduate due to budget cutbacks, who would say
that that assertion is rather naive.

Partly it's a matter of scale. If you want to learn Java or Javascript,
you'll find TONS of free resources on the Web that will get you going. The
Csound community is perhaps 0.1% of the size of the Javascript community, so
it's not entirely surprising that there's a need for more better tutorials.

Also, I'm sensitive on this subject because I've been writing and editing
how-to material for musicians who use synthesizers for the past 30 years.
When I look at the Csound manual's page on Real-time MIDI Support, for
instance: (a) It never mentions using the GUI as an option, only the command
line, and (b) the words "buffer" and "latency" are never used. That being
the case, I would not characterize this page as providing a sufficient
discussion of the topic. I'm speaking not as a baffled musician (though I'm
sometimes in that category) but as a professional editor.

In the past year or two I've done a fair amount of hobbyist programming of
text-based games using a system called TADS 3. The TADS author community is
at least one order of magnitude smaller than the Csound user community, and
very likely two or three orders of magnitude smaller. If there are more than
a hundred TADS 3 users in the world, I'd be shocked. Yet the TADS
documentation ... well, it's not perfect (and TADS users will tell you I
like to kvetch about it), but it's much more thorough and readable than the
Csound documentation.

I suspect one important reason why that's the case is that the TADS
community, like the world at large, consists primarily of Windows and Mac
users. The Csound community, in contrast, is overbalanced in the direction
of Unix/Linux users. Unix/Linux users are, by and large, extremely
computer-literate and used to figuring stuff out for themselves. Mac and
Windows users are not. I suspect (though I can't prove it) that the state of
the Csound documentation more closely reflects the attitudes and
expectations of the Unix/Linux community.

It's a theory, anyhow. Maybe I'm entirely wrong. As always, YMMV.

--JA

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