Developer Jason Timm has released Csound for iPad – an editor/player utility for the Csound music programming language.
Csound is a programming language, in C, designed for manipulating sound. It was originally created by Barry Vercoe at MIT in 1984.
Csound currently runs on many varieties of UNIX and Linux, Microsoft DOS and Windows, all versions of the Macintosh operating system including Mac OS X, and OS’s.
Features:
- Edit, perform, store Csound CSDs on an iPad.
- Transfer CSDs to/from computer with iTunes.
- Control Csound instruments via CoreMIDI.
- Record realtime audio performance as WAV file.
Csound for iPad is tested to work with bluetooth keyboard (recommended) and with available CoreAudio compatible hardware.
Csound is a free download from the App Store.
Awesome!
Radical!
Mathematical!!
Incredibly hard to use!
A textual synth programming language on a touch screen must be the ultimate electro-acoustic self-flagellation.
ASCII art sine wave.
ASCII ART SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAVE.
Well, that’s it – looks like other synth manufacturers might as well give up and go home. CSound is certainly the most superior music production system in existence and those programmers who are doing DSP and sequencing in languages like C obviously do not know what they are doing.
This will rock the academic music world to its foundations. Now serious people in computer music departments will be able to make dull inaccessible music on tablets rather than laptops and desktops, so that more people than ever will be able to pretend they are listening.
Sorry, been to too many academic music events where musicality is the ghost at the feast.
No offence, but this clearly isn’t a replacement for anything like that. It’s for people who want to play around with the underpinnings of synth code, and stuff like that. If you don’t want to do that, then don’t. Also, there’s nothing to say that musicality and technology can’t go together. Particularly with synthesis, you need both.
Anyhow, CSound isn’t even all that bad to use. I used it a while back to do some synths on a rasPi, as it didn’t have the power to run anything more than that.
awsome, but.. any instruction? Just how to create and store new CSD files? The website is down…
CSound is a bit complicated to learn but it is really powerful and useful. If you want to delve deep into synthesis and have access to many rare synthesis types, this is it. There’s things i’ve done in CSound that i wouldn’t have known what else to use.
So yeah, I won’t be using this to compose my magnum opus. But next time I’m waiting at the dentist’s office, I’ll run this and probably have a lot of fun and maybe even learn something. Thank you, Mr. Timm!
Someone has a manual?
It’s not available at the Portuguese store, I’m a student starting to work on csound,
Would it be possible to make it available at the Portuguese store?