I am very busy with just this issue; primarily for CDP, but I will ~probably~ do
some spin-off facilities for Csound. For example, I have an initial version of a
WAVE player which will read a 4-channel file and mix it to two with primitive
panning. It is hardly state-of-the-art, but is perhaps better than nothing. A
soon as I have access to a card with a quad driver, I will extend it to true
quad playback. Writing to two soundcards does not appeal to me at all - I might
try it as a proverbial 'exercise'. So - brief commercial - CDP will have support
for at least 4-ch files in its next release, including a waveform viewer, and a
basic set of quad manipulation utilities - pan, merge/extract, and a simple quad
reverb. Most of our processing programs have in any case always been able to
process files with any number of channels. So that will be at least one product
that does read Quad files!

More to the point, it is now only a matter of time before true multi-channel
cards are generally available to play quad files. I have mentioned the Sonorus
card to the list already - Sonorus offer two 8-channel devices, either of which
should presumably be able to read a quad file.

No software for the card is described on the Sonorus website, so quad file
editing facilities may be a bit meagre. This card is apparently the same as
Creamware's T-DAT16, so presumably that uses the same drivers, and it has of
course a large software package, at a commensurately higher price.

Full quad support has been promised for the ADI Csound card too (hopefully in
the next developer release), which would thus be able to play a quad file sent
from MediaPlayer, for example. It is clear that to accelerate these
developments, we all need to chase up manufacturers (send emails, nag them at
trade shows, etc) to supply multi-channel drivers.

Re Cool Edit Pro - curiously, in their plugin API kit, they include functions
which handle quad files, but they don't yet read or write a quad file. They seem
quite responsive to user feedback, so it may well be that the next version will
indeed handle quad files.

Richard Dobson

Jamie Bullock wrote:
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Graeme Gerrard 
> To: csound mailing list 
> Date: 08 June 1998 03:29
> Subject: Multichannel outs
> 
> >I am interested in generating multichannel output files with Csound (i.e.
> >> quad).
> >Is there a way of doing this with Csound?
> 
> It depends what platform you are using.
> As far as I know, there isn't a PC application that can read Quad files, and
> so the ONLY way to use Csound to do true quad is to do two performance
> passes, one for the front channels, and one for the rear, and then import
> the files into something which supports multichannel routing  (Cooledit pro,
> Cubase VST etc.) and send the appropriate soundfile channels to the
> appropriate soundcard channels.
> However, if you are using a Mac, you can use Tom Erbe's Soundhack program to
> read a Quad file directly. Last time I looked, you could just take in a quad
> file and convert it to four mono files, but Soundhack might actually be able
> to play the sound on different channels now.
> 
>
> 
> P.S.I'm not a programmer, but surely there must be someone out there who
> could write a simple quadfile player for Win95 or Mac?