This question may seem rude, but it's sincere. Where might an interested
newcomer find a really good step-by-step tutorial on how to use Csound
(preferably in Windows or MacOS)? By which I mean, a tutorial that explains
everything that they'll need to know, without making any assumptions or
tossing in any unexplained terms.

Yes, there are "beginner" tutorials on csounds.com. I know that. But they're
fragmentary. As Erle Stanley Gardner used to say in courtroom scenes in the
Perry Mason books, they assume facts not in evidence.

The "Beginning Tutorial" by Barry Vercoe, for instance, includes statements
like this:

> To request your orchestra to perform your score, type the command
> csound intro.orc  intro.sco

The trouble with this is, it doesn't tell you WHERE to type it. Such an
instruction will totally baffle any newcomer who is reading that page hoping
to learn what to do.

Richard Boulanger's beginner tutorial specifically recommends using a word
processor (which is really bad advice), and on page 2 says this: "Run this
with its corresponding score file, toot1.sco." Uhh ... "run"? How would the
beginner discover how to run it? What is "running"? I know the answer, and
you know the answer, but that information is not in the tutorial.

Please understand: The reason this bothers me is because I _like_ Csound. I
would like to be able to recommend it to people as a terrific resource
(which it is). But I have yet to find a coherent step-by-step tutorial that
actually walks the beginner through all of this byzantine jargon and
methodology, beginning with, "When you double-click on the installer, it
will put..." and including EVERYTHING that folks will need to know. Like,
for instance, what's a command line. And what are command-line flags. Not
everyone uses Linux. Not everyone was born knowing this stuff.

I'd love to write a Csound manual that would do all this -- but for better
or worse, I'm a professional writer, and self-employed. I'm a little
reluctant to take on a year-long project as a freebie.

As noted in another post, I'm working on a magazine article to introduce
Csound to musicians. Are there resources I'm not aware of that can help them
get going? If so, please let me know.

--Jim Aikin

-- 
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Even-More-Basic-Newbie-Questions-tp17593236p17593236.html
Sent from the Csound - General mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

In my humble opinion, there does not exist a perfect beginner tutorial for
Csound. I've studied other computer music languages such as Music V, SAOL,
Supercollider and ChucK. All of them suffer from this same issue to some
degree.

My best guess as to why it is hard for someone to learn any computer music
language is because what they are attempting to do is learn three seemingly
very different topics all at once: programming, synthesis/audio theory, and
composition.  Only after having experience with all three will someone be
able to piece them together and understand them as computer music. That in
itself can takes years.

I also believe Csound culture suffers sometimes because it seems everything
is catered to those who already know what they're doing. I've read numerous
Csound related documents that assumes way to much from the intended
audience, including some truly esoteric technical guru type stuff. Much of
the documentation that exists is written from the perspective of an
engineer, rather than a designer or composer. 

This being said, over the last year or so I've seen some highly encouraging
signs that the Csound community is on the verge of shifting gears in a way
that will benefit future Csounders. And in time, I expect there there will
be the types of beginner tutorials that assumes nothing from readers, and
tackles programming, synthesis/audio theory and composition.

Best, 
Jake 
---- 
The Csound Blog 
http://www.thumbuki.com/csound/blog/








Jim Aikin wrote:
> 
> This question may seem rude, but it's sincere. Where might an interested
> newcomer find a really good step-by-step tutorial on how to use Csound
> (preferably in Windows or MacOS)? By which I mean, a tutorial that
> explains everything that they'll need to know, without making any
> assumptions or tossing in any unexplained terms.
> 
> Yes, there are "beginner" tutorials on csounds.com. I know that. But
> they're fragmentary. As Erle Stanley Gardner used to say in courtroom
> scenes in the Perry Mason books, they assume facts not in evidence.
> 
> The "Beginning Tutorial" by Barry Vercoe, for instance, includes
> statements like this:
> 
>> To request your orchestra to perform your score, type the command
>> csound intro.orc  intro.sco
> 
> The trouble with this is, it doesn't tell you WHERE to type it. Such an
> instruction will totally baffle any newcomer who is reading that page
> hoping to learn what to do.
> 
> Richard Boulanger's beginner tutorial specifically recommends using a word
> processor (which is really bad advice), and on page 2 says this: "Run this
> with its corresponding score file, toot1.sco." Uhh ... "run"? How would
> the beginner discover how to run it? What is "running"? I know the answer,
> and you know the answer, but that information is not in the tutorial.
> 
> Please understand: The reason this bothers me is because I _like_ Csound.
> I would like to be able to recommend it to people as a terrific resource
> (which it is). But I have yet to find a coherent step-by-step tutorial
> that actually walks the beginner through all of this byzantine jargon and
> methodology, beginning with, "When you double-click on the installer, it
> will put..." and including EVERYTHING that folks will need to know. Like,
> for instance, what's a command line. And what are command-line flags. Not
> everyone uses Linux. Not everyone was born knowing this stuff.
> 
> I'd love to write a Csound manual that would do all this -- but for better
> or worse, I'm a professional writer, and self-employed. I'm a little
> reluctant to take on a year-long project as a freebie.
> 
> As noted in another post, I'm working on a magazine article to introduce
> Csound to musicians. Are there resources I'm not aware of that can help
> them get going? If so, please let me know.
> 
> --Jim Aikin
> 
> 

-- 
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Even-More-Basic-Newbie-Questions-tp17593236p17606214.html
Sent from the Csound - General mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

There is already an entry on wikipedia on Csound, why don't we simply 
extend it by adding a new section on 'getting started' with Csound. At 
first it will probably be quite messy with plenty of copy and paste 
operations from various other texts but in time it could prove to be a 
useful endeavour. Any thoughts?

Rory.




Felipe Sateler wrote:
> On Monday 02 June 2008 13:55:18 Steven Yi wrote:
>> This is a community
>> project after all, and no need for a single individual to take on the
>> entire task.  I think if we could collaborate to create a general
>> outline of what needs to be covered, we could then volunteer to cover
>> different sections.  Could set up a wiki or shared google doc to do
>> this.  Anyways, just a thought.
> 
> I think a wiki is the way to go for this type of documentation. The csound 
> manual is great as a reference manual, however I would hesitate to recommend 
> it to newcomers.
> The good thing about wikis is that you can enable people that have just 
> overcome problems/discovered something new to document how they solved it in 
> the appropriate place.
> OTOH, wikis have the problem that they are difficult to kickstart, specially 
> if done in a book-like manner, since those small contributions need to be in 
> a larger context that hasn't been created yet. Compare the success of 
> wikipedia versus wikibooks.
> 

One thing I think would be very interesting, would be to have
the entire Csound manual available as a wiki, so that users could
make annotations that might (or might not) be integrated into
follow-on manual revisions.  I find often that the manual is
not enough for me to figure out what a particular opcode is good
for.  If the manual were available as a wiki, I might (for
example) add a page linked from the foscil entry describing my
own experiences exploring FM, which might help another newbie
come to grips with that.

I think I am the opposite of Jim Aikin -- I'm a very experienced
computer user and software developer; an amateur musician somewhat
proficient on a couple of traditional instruments; and a complete
neophyte in the realm of software synthesis and sound engineering.
Having a source of documentation that appeals to both of those
audiences seems to cry out for some kind of collaborative and
easily-augmented doc repository.  We can write what we know,
and read about what we don't.

-- JK

Rory Walsh wrote:
> There is already an entry on wikipedia on Csound, why don't we simply 
> extend it by adding a new section on 'getting started' with Csound. At 
> first it will probably be quite messy with plenty of copy and paste 
> operations from various other texts but in time it could prove to be a 
> useful endeavour. Any thoughts?
> 
> Rory.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Felipe Sateler wrote:
>> On Monday 02 June 2008 13:55:18 Steven Yi wrote:
>>> This is a community
>>> project after all, and no need for a single individual to take on the
>>> entire task.  I think if we could collaborate to create a general
>>> outline of what needs to be covered, we could then volunteer to cover
>>> different sections.  Could set up a wiki or shared google doc to do
>>> this.  Anyways, just a thought.
>>
>> I think a wiki is the way to go for this type of documentation. The 
>> csound manual is great as a reference manual, however I would hesitate 
>> to recommend it to newcomers.
>> The good thing about wikis is that you can enable people that have 
>> just overcome problems/discovered something new to document how they 
>> solved it in the appropriate place.
>> OTOH, wikis have the problem that they are difficult to kickstart, 
>> specially if done in a book-like manner, since those small 
>> contributions need to be in a larger context that hasn't been created 
>> yet. Compare the success of wikipedia versus wikibooks.
>>
> 
> 
> Send bugs reports to this list.
> To unsubscribe, send email sympa@lists.bath.ac.uk with body "unsubscribe 
> csound"
> 
> 


-- 
I do not particularly want to go where the money is -
  it usually does not smell nice there. -- A. Stepanov

On Jun 3, 2008, at 1:21 PM, Felipe Sateler wrote:

> Wikipedia is not a place for documentation. This kind of content  
> will probably
> get deleted by some wikipedist rather fast.

Yeah, I'm afraid of that. Perhaps the Csound wiki could reside at  
csounds.com?
Darren

I would love a copy of The Csound Wiki (instructions for beginners  
especially) to reside at cSounds.com

and I think a wiki (and then Forum) would be great for this.

-dB

On Jun 3, 2008, at 2:11 PM, Darren Nelsen wrote:

> On Jun 3, 2008, at 1:21 PM, Felipe Sateler wrote:
>
>> Wikipedia is not a place for documentation. This kind of content  
>> will probably
>> get deleted by some wikipedist rather fast.
>
> Yeah, I'm afraid of that. Perhaps the Csound wiki could reside at  
> csounds.com?
> Darren
>
>
> Send bugs reports to this list.
> To unsubscribe, send email sympa@lists.bath.ac.uk with body  
> "unsubscribe csound"

Andres Cabrera wrote:

> The current manual is kept in docbook-xml and can easily produce high 
> quality output in html, pdf and winhelp formats. I'm not sure if a wiki 
> can do that as well. The manual is maintained by a few of people in cvs 
> in the sourceforge repository, but contributions from the community are 
> greatly encouraged and are usually promptly added and discussed in this 
> list. The manual has grown from a collection of many different writers, 
> without a clear direction, and it's still very uneven and heterogenous, 
> even though I've tried to improve it in that sense, but it's a huge job. 
> So I'm not really sure a wiki is the best way to go for the reference 
> manual.
> I think the current process is working OK. It's almost like a 
> registration-required hard-to-edit wiki =) ... You just ask john for cvs 
> access, then you edit the xml files (this is actually a pain...).
> or  simply provide your suggestions to this list, and they will almost 
> certainly be incorporated (when time is available...I have a long TODO 
> list).


I'm not particularly interested whether changes to the
hypothetical wiki would or would not be incorporated into it.
I'm curious about what would *happen* if a globally-available
and easily-annotatable version of the manual existed.  If
it's not easy to annotate, people won't do it; and if it's not
globally available, people won't benefit from one another's
expertise.  I personally don't have much interest (at the
moment) in contributing polished material to the official
Csound manual; but if there were a place I could attach some
less-polished notes to the official text, I might very well do
that. Especially if a wider community were also contributing
material from different perspectives -- I could put my own notes
up on my blog, but the chance of someone who would benefit from
them actually finding them in that case is quite small; and by
interacting with a semi-official wiki, I'd be more likely to
notice contributed material that would educate me.

Anyway... it's just a crazy idea.  Maybe everyone would
ignore such a thing, or maybe it would turn out to be too
chaotic to be usable, but it might be worth trying.

-- JK

-- 
I do not particularly want to go where the money is -
  it usually does not smell nice there. -- A. Stepanov

The Manual is the manual and I think of it as a Reference document.

I think a Getting started with CSOUND wiki would be an interesting  
experiment, at least.
Perhaps a subsection of the manual dealing with those intro things -  
incl. some of the stuff that's found from csounds.com  home page -  
could be sectioned off and let loose. Perhaps it could have platform- 
specific threads as well as general threads.

D.
On 04/06/2008, at 3:30 PM, JK wrote:

> Andres Cabrera wrote:
>
>> The current manual is kept in docbook-xml and can easily produce  
>> high quality output in html, pdf and winhelp formats. I'm not sure  
>> if a wiki can do that as well. The manual is maintained by a few of  
>> people in cvs in the sourceforge repository, but contributions from  
>> the community are greatly encouraged and are usually promptly added  
>> and discussed in this list. The manual has grown from a collection  
>> of many different writers, without a clear direction, and it's  
>> still very uneven and heterogenous, even though I've tried to  
>> improve it in that sense, but it's a huge job. So I'm not really  
>> sure a wiki is the best way to go for the reference manual.
>> I think the current process is working OK. It's almost like a  
>> registration-required hard-to-edit wiki =) ... You just ask john  
>> for cvs access, then you edit the xml files (this is actually a  
>> pain...).
>> or  simply provide your suggestions to this list, and they will  
>> almost certainly be incorporated (when time is available...I have a  
>> long TODO list).
>
>
> I'm not particularly interested whether changes to the
> hypothetical wiki would or would not be incorporated into it.
> I'm curious about what would *happen* if a globally-available
> and easily-annotatable version of the manual existed.  If
> it's not easy to annotate, people won't do it; and if it's not
> globally available, people won't benefit from one another's
> expertise.  I personally don't have much interest (at the
> moment) in contributing polished material to the official
> Csound manual; but if there were a place I could attach some
> less-polished notes to the official text, I might very well do
> that. Especially if a wider community were also contributing
> material from different perspectives -- I could put my own notes
> up on my blog, but the chance of someone who would benefit from
> them actually finding them in that case is quite small; and by
> interacting with a semi-official wiki, I'd be more likely to
> notice contributed material that would educate me.
>
> Anyway... it's just a crazy idea.  Maybe everyone would
> ignore such a thing, or maybe it would turn out to be too
> chaotic to be usable, but it might be worth trying.
>
> -- JK