CSOUND Version 5.18 A user-programmable and user-extensible sound processing language and software synthesizer. Csound is copyright (c) 1991 Barry Vercoe, John ffitch. CsoundAC is copyright (c) 2001 by Michael Gogins. Csound is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. Csound is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this software; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA GETTING STARTED CsoundQt, a graphical shell for Csound, makes an excellent place to begin the exploration of Csound, especially because CsoundQt has an extensive menu of built-in examples that show off Csound's capabilities. Many musicians make CsoundQt their main Csound environment, although there are other excellent environments. CsoundQt runs not only Csound code, but also Python scripts. Cabbage is an environment for running Csound with custom user interfaces, and these Csound .csd files can be saved as VST plugins. Cabbage does not permit editing .csd files in the VST host, but does provide custom user interface widgets. The tutorial/tutorial.pdf file is an illustrated tutorial of how to find, install, configure, and use Csound. To get started with real-time MIDI performance, for example, see Section 2.1.3. The tutorial/Csound_Algorithmic_Composition_Tutorial.pdf is an illutrated tutorial of how to use CsoundAC to do algorithmic composition (score generation). This tutorial includes several complete pieces. The examples directory contains numerous working Csound orchestras and even complete pieces. The examples/Boulanger_Examples directory contains hundreds of working Csound orchestras. The doc/manual/html/indexframes.html file is the front page to the Csound Reference Manual. This version of Csound is programmable in Python, Java, Lua, and LISP, and scores can be generated in these languages. The doc/manual/api/index.html file is the front page to the C/C++ Csound and Csound API application programming interfaces reference, but it is also helpful when programming Csound in other languages. INSTALLATION See the Csound documentation in the doc directory, or go to http://csounds.com or http://sourceforge.net/projects/csound. CONTRIBUTORS Csound contains contributions from musicians, scientists, and programmers from around the world. They include (but are not limited to): Allan Lee Andres Cabrera Bill Gardner Bill Verplank Dan Ellis David Macintyre Eli Breder Gabriel Maldonado Greg Sullivan Hans Mikelson Istvan Varga Jean Piché John ffitch John Ramsdell Marc Resibois Mark Dolson Matt Ingalls Max Mathews Michael Casey Michael Clark Michael Gogins Mike Berry Paris Smaragdis Perry Cook Peter Neubäcker Peter Nix Rasmus Ekman Richard Dobson Richard Karpen Rob Shaw Robin Whittle Rory Walsh Sean Costello Steven Yi Tom Erbe Victor Lazzarini Ville Pulkki
