Ciro Santilli took courses once upon a time, maybe that has influenced his passion? Ciro Santilli's musical education.
Looking for formats that:
- are human readable plaintext files
- can be converted/played as MIDI
- can be converted to sheet music PDFs
- supports basic guitar effects (bends and slides)
Standard from 2011: abcnotation.com/wiki/abc:standard:v2.1
No bend/vibratto/slides :-(
Multitrack volatile: abcnotation.com/wiki/abc:standard:v2.1#multiple_voices
Higher level than Csound: describes the notes only, not the exact waveforms it seems.
Therefore also a bit harder to convert to actual sound: stackoverflow.com/questions/33775336/convert-musicxml-to-wav but possibly easier to convert to LilyPond.
Now they need to create a "MusicCSS" that gives the waveforms! :-)
Except that instead of machines, you have separate programs. One such typical link is:
- from a MIDI source, e.g. vmpk or a MIDI editor with playback like Ardour
- to a synthesizer like FluidSynth or ZynAddSubFX
The advantage of this setup is that separate programs can collaborate to make complex sounds.
The disadvantage of this setup is that it makes it very hard to reproduce results, you basically need a Docker image with the exact same version of everything. And some script to launch and connect all programs correctly.
Simulates vintage hardware synthesizers, and includes some pretty complex ones!
Aims to show an UI that looks exactly like the synthesizers in question.
Synthesizes MIDI input. vmpk +
aconnect + Advanced Linux Sound Architecture hello world: askubuntu.com/questions/34391/virtual-midi-piano-keyboard-setup/1298026#1298026Supports only very basic effects it seems: chorus effect and reverberation. The main way to add instruments to it is via SoundFont files.
This software feels amazing. You can really start composing very quickly, lots of features, good keyboard shortcuts.
Ubuntu 20.04: sound preview worked, first hat that trailing Contra-like sound artifacts (like
spd-say), but then it went away?Just use MuseScore instead.
Can import from: MIDI.
Ubuntu 20.04:
sudo apt install tuxguitar tuxguitar-alsa tuxguitar-jsa tuxguitar-osstuxguitar-jsa was needed, otherwise no sound: askubuntu.com/questions/457321/tuxguitar-no-sound-in-14-04Has OK step sequencer non-realtime up/down/left/right guitar based composition interface.
Has chord insertion.
Has bend editor.
Could be more amazing, but it is OK.
A bit limited by being very "guitar oriented". Shows you guitar strings, and you enter offset to each string. So to enter two adjacent notes you need to use two seprate strings and thing about the offsets. If only it had a more piano based interface.
Drum notation is also atrocious, you have to go to the top chord, and use high numbers starting at 36.
Weight: heavy.
MIDI support is kind of secondary: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnkJ0uYXMG8, e.g. how to export MIDI? discourse.ardour.org/t/export-an-entire-project-into-a-midi-file/88116
Very easy to use and pretty powerful MIDI creator!!!
One of the rare audio applications actually works with PulseAudio on Ubuntu 20.04 out-of-the-box, so you don't have to turn off every other audio application!!!
Has lot's of plugins built-in just working out of the box, e.g. ZynAddSubFX out-of-the-box without doing a gazillion complex setup connections.
Most plugins are just simple toys however, ZynAddSubFX is the only super powerful one. The others are more LMMS integrate however, and seem to use a more dedicated LMMS GUI style.
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:
sudo apt install csound
git clone https://github.com/csound/csound
cd csound
git checkout 92409ecce053d707360a5794f5f4f6bf5ebf5d24
csound examples/xanadu.csdSave 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
csound -o xanadu.wav xanadu.csdcsound --ogg -o xanadu.ogg xanadu.csdTODO find the most amazing set of songs made with it on GitHub? Some examples:
- www.csounds.com/toots/index.html has a good 101 on instrument design
- Csound FLOSS manual
- iainmccurdy.org/csound.html about 100 CC BY-SA examples. Each is a minimal study showing a specific technique, not a full composition, some seem advanced. Dude's a beast.
- github.com/csound/csound/tree/f2e70825fb543a6b15011c6984371f61ab2a00dd/tests/soak in-tree minimal examples
- github.com/csound/manual/tree/4049b286493d972ff7248b5596e47e7ae97a0cf9/examples contains the examples for the manual which is rendered at: It's insane, but it's fun! Ah those newbs who separate manuals from main tree.
- linuxsynths.com/CsoundPatchesDemos/csound.html on LinuxSynths
- github.com/csound/examples/tree/ae578159328178142c1055c7f78e28b42eb29774/csd as a few dozen examples
- freaknet.org/martin/audio/csound/ 10 pieces with source
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:
- csound/sine.csd
- csound/amplitude_frequency.csd
- csound/linen.csd: simple attack/release envelope, documented at: www.csounds.com/manual/html/linen.html
- csound/chorus.csd: chorus effect
- csound/bend.csd: bend using
linseg - csound/vibrato.csd
- csound/crossfade_generators.csd
- csound/table.csd
- csound/virtual_keyboard.csd
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