| Bill DeWitt wrote:
> And so far I have only found
> broken links for Common Music and a hint that I'll have to use a DOS box to
> run it anyway.
Oh, how horrible! A DOS Box! That's text-only, isn't it !?!?
Sorry, couldn't resist - just teasing :-)
The links should work tho, if not try starting at
http://ccrma-www.stanford.edu and go from there.
Now, as much as I like Common Music and wish more people used it, and as
much as it is encouraging for me to see a number of people recommending
it, I think that perhaps the overhead in learning a new programming
language (Lisp) is being downplayed a bit, especially since you say,
Bill, that you don't want to learn an other language. In my own case, as
someone that was used to C, it seemed strange at first and took a while
to get used to it. Sure, the learning curve investment paid off in the
end, and I'm very happy with the Common Music environment. And, I really
am impressed with the power, interactivity, and fast development times
that Lisp seems to afford. I think it's just an historical accident that
Lisp never really gained a critial mass of acceptance.That being said,
however, reading and tweaking Lisp code surely wasn't something that in
a couple days time, I was able to feel comfortable with. There was some
initial effort.
SO,
I guess what I'm saying is that if you want to use a powerfull
algorithmic composition environment, that provides great support for
both sequencer-like and algorithmic composition, lets you output MIDI,
Csound, CLM, and postscript-formatted staff notation, provides a set of
recursive "item stream" types for algorithmic composition, has a
powerfull scale/ mode description mechanism, some pitch-class set
functions, etc, etc, then it will be worth it for you to get Common
Music running.
HOWEVER,
If all you want to do is figure out how to repeat notes in a score, and
only need to solve that particular problem, then IMHO Common Music is
overkill. Use whatever scripting language you are comfortable with to
generate your score file. Like someone said, even a spreadsheet will do
the trick. Or almost any other language, Visual Basic, a Unix shell, a
Microsoft Word macro, will work. That's sort of the prevailing
attitude about the Csound score language. Rather than enhancing the
score language itself, most people are happy to use whatever programming
tools they are comfortable with, to generate a score file.
In this sense, you can almost compare the score-file format to the
MIDI-file format, in the sense that both are low-level, direct
representations. Consider that even though a number of utilities are
available to generate a MIDI file, from an ASCII equivalent, that not
many people will like to type in the MIDI messages at that level.
Instead, most people use a MIDI sequencer, which can easily repeat
sections of events, transpose, shift in time, and the like.
Larry |