Csound tutorials
These Csound tutorials are designed to showcase various aspects of using Csound on an XO computer.
Tutorials and Resources
- Writing an Csound-based activity with csndsugui
- Updating Csound with RPM on a XO
- 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
Unpack Files
Downloaded files usually come in one of three archival formats: tar, tar.gz and zip.
- tar xvpf file.tar Unpacks a tar file
- tar xvpfz file.tar.gz Unpacks a tar.gz file
- unzip file.zip Unpacks a zip file
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>