I don't know about musickit, but I have an old print manual for cmusic
here. It's a xerox, and I can't find an author or a date listed on it
anywhere. I played with cmusic for a few days several years ago and
found it in some ways easier than csound, in some ways more limited (but
that may have been lack of experience... and it's not like I'm a csound
expert either). 

Generally I think the score was more flexible (at least until some
recent additions to the csound score language), but the instrument
definitions were more limited. At the time of the manual I have, there
were about 35 unit generators.

There's a very short blurb on the PLUM list at
http://209.233.20.72/plum/
including an apparently dead link to a homepage.

I found a homepage at http://crca-www.ucsd.edu/cmusic/cmusic.html. It
lists ports for Sun, NeXT, VAX, and pcmusic for DOS/Windows. Nothing
about linux, and I'm not sure if source is available.
On Dave Phillips' Linux soundapps page (at
http://www.bright.net/~dlphilp/linux_soundapps.html ), Dave notes that
the DOS port called pcmusic will run on Linux under DOSEMU.

Here's a very short cmusic score (note that orc/sco are in one file in
cmusic). This should give you a basic idea of what the syntax is like.
The main things I notice are the #include statement, the liberal use of
strings in the score, including calling instruments by name rather than
number, and the pitch notation which I have often wished for in csound.



#include 

instrument 0 simple ;
	osc	b1 p5 p6 f1 d ;
	out b1;
end ;

SINE(f1);

	{comments appear in curly braces }
     {p1=cmd} {p2=time} {p3=ins} {p4=dur} {p5=amp} {p6=pitch}

	note	0.0	simple	.15	0dB	 A(0);
	note	0.35	simple	.20	-6dB	 Cs(1);
	note	0.7	simple	.10	-10dB	 B(0);
	terminate;

{ end of score. }

An interesting contrast with Csound: you can write arithmetic
expressions using pfields within notes, but NOT within the instrument
definitions. So these are legal note definitions:

	merge; {this is required to allow notes to be out of sequence}
	note 	0          obnoxious   1dB           1/p4Hz  0dB A(0);
	note 	0+rand(10) nice        rand(1)-23dB  220+rand(880)Hz;

But this is an illegal line in an instrument:

	osc b1 p6 1/p4Hz f2 d ; { p4 is not yet a known value. yuck. }


Interesting language. I sort of wish I had it running here...

HTH,

Paul Winkler

(new address: slinkp@ulster.net)

Jim Stevenson  wrote:

>What do you listers know about cmusic?
>
>Is there anything like Next musickit for linux?