| Jean, you wrote:
> Compared to a myriad of other midi score
> processors/generators, Csound is an extremely poor choice. Use
> Max, or better still, Common Music. You already have real-time
> control input to Csound via console-driven events (-L). Use
> it. THere are dozens of different ways to do granular
> synthesis in Csound as it is. As a control language, Csound
> is very terse and weak compared to just about anything else.
> You'd be better off writing something new in another language
> (tcl, perl, C, lisp, anything) to replicate the (simple) table
> referencing capabilities of csound and moving on from there to
> more interesting things...
I see this as a matter of using the right tool for the job; in other words, the approach you take depends on the kind
of music-making you're doing. I do agree, though, that Csound's strength is as a highly configurable tone generator,
not as a control language for music. For creating "static" scores, CSound's score language is (on its own) WAY too
cumbersome and lacks most of the basic musical control primitives. Granted, one *could* spend a lot of time building
up a library of score-generating tools in some other language, but why bother when there are so many superior tools
already available? Again, if you're just arranging static, sequential events, almost any decent commercial MIDI
sequencer would do just fine, given that we already have midi2csound. Back in 92, I was experimenting with creating
scores in a MIDI sequencer & exporting them to Csound for "rendering". I never did complete an entire piece this way,
but it seemed like a very promising approach.
However, if you want to do things like algorithmic composition or real-time interactive pieces, you'll hit the wall
quickly with commercial MIDI sequencers.
On the other hand, Max has it's own set of limitations, having mainly to do with its use of graphical control flow
representation. It also has a lot of timing overhead with all those graphics. If you want to get into heavy-duty
real-time stuff, FORTH (or HMSL) is probably better. Don't know much about Common Music, so I can't comment here.
On a related note, I haven't yet succeeded in getting realtime CSound working, but I did read somewhere in the
release notes that there were some pretty major timing problems associated with using MIDI for real-time control of
CSound orchestras. Has anybody managed to get this working with satisfactory real-time response using reasonably
complex instruments (say, on the order of a DX7)?
- Michael
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