Elizabeth Lysinger wrote:

> Is there any way to hook up Csound to SMPTE or some other form of 
> standard time code, so that the end product of the orc/sco 
> can be synced 
> up to video, without having it transferred to a soundfile or 
> DAT, first?  

It sounds like you may be talking about real-time Csound output?

I'm not really sure how successful trying to sync real-time output from
Csound to video or timecode would be. Three problems are:

1. To my knowledge, Csound has no way of slaving to, or otherwise
referencing timecode directly.

2. Lack of common clock reference between timecode and Csound would cause
drift over time, although depending on your soundcard and other equipment,
there are ways around this.

3. The ever-present latency issues. See several other threads on this list
about this topic.

If you are running Csound in real-time with MIDI control, I suppose you
could drive it with a sequencer which is slaved to timecode, but latency
would be a real problem, especially if you are running a software sequencer
on the same machine as Csound, and/or you have a complex orc/sco. I've never
tried it; I don't use MIDI. If you have a capable setup, it would certainly
be worth experimenting to see what the limits are. Please let us know what
you find out.

The only other usable approach I can think of, is what you apparently want
to avoid. Render Csound to disk, put the resultant AIFF or WAV file in an
editor (or on a tape) which can be synced to timecode, and place it wherever
you want it. We do this all the time.

There are a few fairly complex issues in either of these approaches, most of
which seem beyond the scope of this list. Feel free to contact me off-list
if you would like more technical detail.

Hope this helps.

-David.