Re: Our csound system, was Show this Saturday

> I just read you message today, and I'm very pleasantly surprised that 
> your extremely complex setup ran properly. From what I remember there 
> were some failure reports with very complex code. Also some very nice 
> ideas there that I'll try in the future.
> Did you run your live show on Windows or on linux?

Yeah, we discovered that once the ensemble reached a certain size we couldn't
run it on CsoundAV anymore, for no apparent reason. Runs only on Varga Csound
4.23.4 on linux at the moment, though we have not started testing it on csound 5
yet.

> I really like your idea of modular code can be recycled. I started 
> writing my current setup several months ago, and it's so convoluted now 
> and so targeted to a particular performance that not very much is easily 
> recyclable, but I'll make sure it is for my next project.

Yeah, we've gone through several different approaches now. User opcodes in
csound 5 will make life a LOT easier in this regard. Right now we have pretty
heavy use of macros in place, which works well but is a royal pain to debug.
Saving all patch data in tables helps a lot too, so the same csound file can be
used for many synths by only changing the patch table number and a handful of
macros that determine oscillator type, coarse tuning, etc.

> I see you recommend using pd for the graphical interface, maybe that can 
> be changed to a Csound FLTK interface when Csound5 is stable? That could 
> give better resolution than MIDI, but I'm not sure if it would affect 
> real-time performance...

Actually, we use no GUI in performance. We were using PD a bit for testing and
prototyping. We did try making guis for some features with the fltk opcodes, but
we discovered that there was a fairly significant hit in how much/how fast we
could run the whole thing. So all the real time editing is done with midi input
from hardware. We used PD to simulate midi hardware options when developing. 

Our longer range plan is to make a C++/Python host app that will embed csound5
and handle all user input, file i/o, and midi i/o. Then csound will only run
audio and timing in a higher priority thread, and any communication with the
audio thread will be via the api. I've started working on this, but there is a
fair bit to learn. If anyone out there has more experience with C++ and
designing fairly complex event based apps, I would love help/advice, etc.

I just found out our site is down right now, but I'll put our code up as soon as
it's back online, and also the beginning of the simple host app in C++/FLTK in
case anyone wants to help.

> I'm curious, what is your schmo job? ... I am about to quit mine...

Just at a climbing gym, but when it's dead I can work on my computer thanks to
SSH and VNC! ; )

Iain

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