Csound

Csound is a computer programming language for sound, also known as a sound compiler or an audio programming language, or more precisely, an audio DSL. It is called Csound because it is written in C, as opposed to some of its predecessors. Csound is a computer programming language for sound, also known as a sound compiler or an audio programming language, or more precisely, an audio DSL. It is called Csound because it is written in C, as opposed to some of its predecessors. It is free software, available under the LGPL. Csound was originally written at MIT by Barry Vercoe in 1985, based on his earlier system called Music 11, which in its turn followed the MUSIC-N model initiated by Max Mathews at the Bell Labs. Its development continued throughoutthe 1990s and 2000s, led by John Fitch at the University of Bath. The first documented version 5 release is version 5.01 on March 18, 2006. Many developers have contributed to it, most notably Istvan Varga, Gabriel Maldonado, Robin Whittle, Richard Karpen, Michael Gogins, Matt Ingalls, Steven Yi, Richard Boulanger, and Victor Lazzarini. Developed over many years, it currently has nearly 1700 unit generators. One of its greatest strengths is that it is completely modular and extensible by the user. Csound is closely related to the underlying language for the Structured Audio extensions to MPEG-4, SAOL. Csound takes two specially formatted text files as input. The orchestra describes the nature of the instruments and the score describes notes and other parameters along a timeline. Csound processes the instructions in these files and renders an audio file or real-time audio stream as output. The orchestra and score files may be unified into a single structured file using markup language tags (a CSD file with filename extension .csd). Here is a very simple example of a unified Csound data file which produces a wave file containing a one-second sine wave tone of 1 kHz at a sample rate of 96 kHz: As with many other programming languages, writing long programs in Csound can be eased by using an integrated environment for editing, previewing, testing, and debugging. The one now officially supported is CsoundQt, and it has many features, such as automatic code insertion, integrated documentation browser, integrated widgets for graphically controlling parameters in realtime, plus a button for playing the code. Version 5.01 was released on March 18, 2006 – 20 years after csound's first release. Csound 5 is available in binary and source code for Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X from the SourceForge Csound project. It is much improved and expanded compared to the original software, effectively made into a software library with an API. A variety of front ends have been developed for it. In addition to the basic C API, there are also Python, Java, Lisp, Tcl and C++ among other bindings, like one from Haskell which allows control of Csound from a purely functional environment. The use of plug-ins allows additional capabilities without modifications to the Csound code, as there is the possibility to write user-defined opcodes as extensions to the original language. LADSPA and DSSI are supported, but VST support has been removed.