Never having seen the PPC version of csound, I would like to ask: does 
it support the -L command argument (to read line events from a device, 
e.g. keyboard input)? I can't think of how you'd do something like that 
on a Mac, but I'm not a Mac guy, and it would please me greatly if it is 
possible.

The reason I wonder: I've just tested the -L flag on linux csound 3.48 
with a dumb little Tk script (call it "boink") that writes a csound 
score event to standard output when a button is pushed. The results are 
heard instantaneously. Works for me but I would love to be able to 
eventually give my tklets away to my many mac-using friends.

This was inspired by Peter Neubacker's recent message about line events, 
a method of csound control that had never occurred to me. I see great 
possibilities for wonderful and strange realtime csound control applets 
here; for instance it occurs to me that maybe Cecilia does some of its 
work this way. In unix it's simple to pipe the event to csound in 
realtime:

boink | csound -L stdin -o devaudio orcfile scofile

...where "boink" is any app in any language that writes text to standard 
output, and where the orc & sco are set up to keep running for some 
length of time awaiting input...

I don't think "standard output" has any meaning on the Mac; so what 
would you use as the "device" for -L, assuming this flag is even 
available?  Or is there any other way to get similar results?

Regards,

PW

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On Mon, 25 May 1998, Paul Winkler wrote:

> Never having seen the PPC version of csound, I would like to ask: does 
> it support the -L command argument (to read line events from a device, 
> e.g. keyboard input)? I can't think of how you'd do something like that 
> on a Mac, but I'm not a Mac guy, and it would please me greatly if it is 
> possible.

 As you note, pipes are not really a Mac concept, so the -L flag is of
little use on MacOS. The Mac way to do interapplication stuff is with
AppleEvents, so the logical thing would be to make the PPC Csound aware of an
event that would get channelized in the "-L" code. 

 However, something else creeps in: multitasking. The MacOS has
cooperative multitasking, and the way Csound is written for the mac is
really not cooperative, so it's performance is sluggish if not in the
foreground. That poses some problems if you want to use another
application that drives Csound... (you can try it with the IAC bus and a
MIDI app, for instance Max). As Mike Berry said earlier today it would be
possible to re-write the thing cleanly, but it's not a trivial project. 

 So right now Mac users are out of luck if they want realtime control 
from another app running on the same machine.


						Alex Burton.