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From: jalkio@cc.helsinki.fi
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: Csound and synthesis
Message-ID: <1991Jun18.210901.1@cc.helsinki.fi>
Date: 18 Jun 91 19:09:01 GMT
References: <1991Jun13.210000.1@cc.helsinki.fi> <3308@esquire.dpw.com>
Sender: news@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Uutis Ankka)
Organization: University of Helsinki
Lines: 46

In article <3308@esquire.dpw.com>, rreid@DPW.COM (r l reid ) writes:
> In article <1991Jun13.210000.1@cc.helsinki.fi> jalkio@cc.helsinki.fi writes:
>>Are there any books on Csound or software music synthesis and algorithms
>>in general? Reading the Csound docs is a bit "experimental" if you have
>>stepped to this kind of system from commercial hardware synthesizers :-)
> 
> The CSound manual is actually quite good for that - has a tutorial and
> everything.  But for background, get hold of these:

Actually, after playing a bit with the Csound I find the documentation
quite o.k., as long as you know what you are doing.

>>Oh, and I would like to get recommendations about which
>>languages/systems are good to make music with. I have a NeXTstation and
>>enough hard disk space (about 700MB) to do some composition.
> You have the necessary hardware.  As for language, it depends an 
> awful lot on what you intend to do with it.  Most everyone I
> know who does software synthesis uses a little bit of everything.
> 
>>I thought that Csound is "the best" but then I heard that it isn't so
>>spectacular.
> Such generalizations serve no purpose.  Csound has certain advantages
> (rather complete documentation being one of them) while cmix has
> total flexibility (but very little documentation).  Saying that
> "CSound isn't so spectacular", tho is a real slap in the face -
> would you prefer to write you wavetables by hand?

That was a friend of mine who said that Csound isn't good. I have now
even done short pieces with it and I find it quite interesting! It feels
great to use this kind of system after commercial hard wired
synthesizers. Now I have limitless number of oscillators and
everything...

One question though: Is the best way to incorporate sampled sounds to
use the GEN1 function generator? (And not the soundin operation in the
orchestra file.) I have a problem making the samples sound at the
correct pitch. Has the samplefile to be exactly the same length than the
table to which I am loading the file? (It's a pity since the table
length can only be a power of 2 and the samplefiles aren't usually
exactly that long.)


> 
> Ro

			Jouni