Csound tutorials

These Csound tutorials are designed to showcase various aspects of using Csound on an XO computer.

Tutorials and Resources

• Csound TOOTS An Instrument Design TOOTorial by Dr. Richard Boulanger
• A Beginning Tutorial by Barry Vercoe.
• Chapter 1 from The Csound Book The complete first chapter from The Csound Book, by Dr. Richard Boulanger
• Recontextualizing Ambient Music in Csound by Kim Cascone
• cSounds.com Tutorials Directory
• The Csound Journal and Magazine
• The Csound Blog

Exploring Csound from the XO Terminal

Downloading with wget

The terminal utility wget downloads files directly from the internet. The following example downloads 4csEditor.zip, a library of approximately 500 Csound csd files:

 wget http://csounds.com/4csEditor.zip

Flags

Flags change the behavior of Csound, and can be set either in a Csound csd file or by specifying them at the command prompt. The following is a list of the most common used flags in both Csound-based activities and the Terminal activity:

• --help A complete list of supported command-line flags for Csound.
• -odac Output audio stream to the Digital-to-analog_converter, sound card
• -iadc Read audio from the Analog_to_digital_converter, built-in microphone
• -d Suppress all displays
• -m0 Set message level to 0
• -b2048 Set sample frames per software sound I/O buffer to 2048
• -B4096 Set samples per hardware sound I/O buffer 20 4096
• -+rtaudio=alsa Set real time audio to the device alsa
• -+rtmidi=alsa Set real time MIDI to device alsa

The following line shows one possible example of rendering a Csound csd file named foo.csd in real time.:

 csound -odac -d -m0 -b2048 -B4096 -+rtaudio=alsa foo.csd

Users can hardcode flags directly in a Csound csd between the markup tags <CsOptions> and </CsOptions> with a text editor such as vi:

 <CsOptions>
 -odac -d -m0 -b2048 -B4096 -+rtaudio=alsa
 </CsOptions>