Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli  40

TODO there was one which was relly good, can't find it anymore. One day.

The Google Story Chapter 21. A Virtual Library mentions that Paul Allen was interested in trying to create something like the "Final Encyclopedia" from this book. This is somewhat the same motivation for Google Books and Google's activities more broadly, as shown in their organise the world's information mission statement.

XML file format (but with 99% of the action of interest in a domain-specific language on the CsInstruments and CsScore elements) that can be played and the reference implementation. Offers complex effects out-of-box apparently.

Allows you to easily define instruments with seemingly arbitrary mathematical functions, and then use them to play notes at given time intervals.

The instrument functions can be parametrized, and each note played can have different parameters.

The instrument definition actually defines a block diagram graph, much like a hardware synthesizer would.

Csound is so not-bloated that it contains an UI system. And it includes an interactive virtual MIDI keyboard that interacts with parameter knobs: www.csounds.com/manual/html/MidiTop.html

But hey, it's fun. And like any other good domain-specific language, debugging it is barbaric of course.

If only it had been written in Python... the array manipulation boilerplate would be likely perfect for NumPy, and this would have been exactly what Ciro Santilli wanted!

CSound states that one of its design goals is backward compatibility, and it shows. Some of the stuff is utterly arcane, e.g. you have to remember what GEN10, GEN11, etc. mean instead of having named enums.

It just worked on Ubuntu 20.04 no questions asked:which runs this file: github.com/csound/csound/blob/92409ecce053d707360a5794f5f4f6bf5ebf5d24/examples/xanadu.csd and this plays a relly cool sound demo:

Save to file instead of playing:or direct ogg output:or pipe to stdout to FFmpeg TODO: stackoverflow.com/questions/64970503/how-to-pipe-csound-output-to-ffmpeg-for-conversion-without-an-intermediate-file

TODO find the most amazing set of songs made with it on GitHub? Some examples:

Documentation-wise, it's a bit lacking. The only dude who can explain it really well, Dr Richard Boulanger, made the "The Csound Book" closed source, so, congrats, this will forever hurt the popularity of Csound.

Examples:

Python library, therefore the nicest possible type of text interface.

stackoverflow.com/questions/32445375/pyo-server-boot-returns-error-on-ubuntu-14-04/64960589#64960589 God how to get it to fucking play a sine sound?!?!

domain-specific language unfortunately, but at least it's on GitHub, looks promising.

How to play scores and save them to files is discussed at: doc.sccode.org/Guides/Non-Realtime-Synthesis.html

They have a nice looking IDE, but running anything from the command-line interface is super hard, much unlike Csound. How to get a decent hello world: stackoverflow.com/questions/65360414/how-to-play-a-supercollider-file-non-interactively-from-the-terminal-command-lin

Sample composition with custom synths + notes: sccode.org/1-5cl

leanpub.com/ScoringSound looks like a decent tutorial, it is basically the Csound FLOSS manual for SuperCollider.

$T^{(m,n)}$ has order $(m,n)$

The best way to watch a television series is: wait for the thing to end. Then watch the first and last episodes of each season. The rest is fluff. And then pick up any missing interesting clips from YouTube. If a series holds you more than those episodes, it is one of the few amazing ones!

If you are going to make a television series, do make it a limited one. Plan one story, and execute it amazingly. Don't let things drag on and on.