Date: Thu, 26 Nov 1998 11:40:17 +0530
From: Drew Skyfyre 
Subject: Realtime PowerMac options (fwd Csound please)
  
Hi All,

Just thought I'd air out a few things regarding realtime
music software on the PowerMac. First, to be honest, I
put Csound aside a few months ago, since the performance 
on PowerMac really started to put me off.

I've recently been looking into other options.

 At the top of my list is SuperCollider
. This is probably the best option
right now. It's programming is text based, like Csound
but simpler. But, you can also make your own graphic 
interface and add items to the menu bar from within
your SuperCollider program ("orc/sco") itself.
It cost $250 (I think) but it is solid. Realtime performance
is excellent. Should be able to do (at least) 
@16 voices of 2-operator FM in realtime.

Other options :

1) Common Lisp Music (CLM), but unfortunately seems to need 
   CodeWarrior. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)
   

2) Max with MSP : powerful, icon based programming. @$800 total.
   Also, a small caveat : although the @$295 fee for MSP is
   a permanent license, you have to get a fresh authorization code
   every 6 months.
   

3) Stephen Travis Pope's Siren (written in Squeak Smalltalk)
   (Not sure about this one, since it seems to be at version 1.31
   for more than 6 months now.)
   

4) Squeak Smalltalk itself. This variation on Smalltalk is available 
   on multiple platforms, was developed on the Macintosh itself 
   (by a team working for Apple) and has built in support for 
   realtime synthesis. One of the pages documenting how the
   language was developed reports that the programmers were able ot
   run 10 voices of FM synthesis in realtime on a PowerBook 5300 !!!
   Oh yeah, it's free and the source code is public.
    

5) Nyquist. I don't know much about it, except that it's not
   realtime. Probably faster than Csound, though.
   Check here : 


And, there is LinuxPPC . Yup, Linux
for ALL PowerMacs, including G3s. This appears to be just coming
into it's own. Could be a brave new world for Macs, but still
don't know of anyone using it for music.


Cheers,
Drew