Jean Piche wrote:

> I haven't jumped into this (or anything else for a while) but Paul's
> response compels me to chime in. On Unix platforms at least, Csound is a
> wonderful low-latency high performance real-time DSP environment that
> easily rivals MAX/MSP on the Mac in terms of ressources. I have not done
> tests, but i would wager that Csound on a 150MHz SGI Indy has at least
> equal crunching power and audio throughput as MSP on a 300Mhz G3. Its
> not the machine, its the nature of the code and the operating system.

Well, as much as I love my SGI when its running csound it is no match for Max/MSP
in real-time performance on a G3 (you need ram for max to run well, but also on my
O2 the more ram the better the performance -- not only csound but system
performance). I have done some simple tests and you can do a ton of simple
processes(fm, filters and soundfile i/o) with low latency and it doesnt have to do
orc/sco preprocessing. Yes, csound is more flexible in some aspects but not in the
real-time world. A G3 can easily do fft/ifft phase vocoder implementations or fft
based 512 band eq processes (even on a 120mhz 8500, well-- not easy on this
machine). I can not do this using csound on my O2 (even with the code compiled n32
with all the right speed flags) its not that the O2 cant handle it, its more to do
with csound itself. Under jMax, my  180 mhz R5000 O2 really runs well, maybe even
better than a Max/MSP on a G3. Csound code is far from cross-platform optimization
not to mention target-platform, except maybe the Direct X version.

just my $0.02 US...

Michael