The Csound community has been making strides to improve the user-experience, and this effort is really beginning to shine through.
Csound now ships with QuteCsound, a new integrated frontend that comes loaded with extras. The Csound @ Sourceforge page has been given a facelift, in terms of both looks and content. The developers are taking much greater care to make sure installers work with as few as problems as possible. This is only the beginning.
If you have tried Csound in the past, but had problems getting up and running, now is a good time to give it another try. If you do run into problems, don’t keep these issues to yourself. Report them here or the mailing list, and these problems will be taken care of.
Thanks to all the hard work of the developers and others in the community, as it seems that Csound has a promising future.
I wrote a blog post recently about wanting to use Csound to make custom instruments based upon single samples as well as larger sample sets. Up until now, I have been thinking purely in terms of needing a huge “does everything I need” sampler, and then I suddenly realized that apps like Csound and Supercollider provide perfect platforms for treating individual samples and multi-samples as their own instruments. So yes, I will now be sitting down with QuteCsound and my Csound Book, which I got many years ago. I’m also interested in the Csound API as a possible way to create GUIs for each of my custom instruments, the same way Kontakt can create individualized GUIs for each instrument, with just a few relevant controls. But first, the basics.
I’ll definitely check out the new, improved, (user-friendly?) version of this software. Tried it once a year ago, couldn’t get past the interface. But this update sound like a weekend project:)
Darren: I think I might just have to make a sample-based instrument for the next coded Csound blog entry.
freakwithoutacause: Though QuteCsound is a relatively new interface, it is leaps and bounds better that the interfaces that uses to ship with Csound. And it’s getting better with each release.
If you are comfortable with a command-line terminal, that might also be an interface worth exploring. I tend to prefer this setup myself.
If you either run into issues, or have questions, feel free to send me a message, as I’d be happy to help out.