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Message started by efthimis on May 16th, 2003, 7:39pm

Title: Some questions about linux music production
Post by efthimis on May 16th, 2003, 7:39pm

Hello.I have switched to the linux platform about a year ago - i love it so much...
It fullfils a great percent of my needs - from programming to almost anything.
I have been into music for quite sometime and own myself some hardware units too.
The software explosion the last 5 years for composition and synthesis in the window$ platform was unbelieavable - there w?re many  applications i loved there including this really beatiful tracker called Buzz, fruityloops , etc...

I have tried a lot of sound-sunthesis software for the linux platform but i must admit
i wasn't thrilled. And i love being on this platform so much that i dont like switching to windows at all - the result is that music making has been quite on hold for this year....

After some deeper searching i did some exploration on Csound and i must admit that after rendering some soundfiles i was astounded by the sound quality and the infinite synthesis abilities - after some more searching i discovered RTCmix too which i havent yet tried :-)

I would really love to transfer all my music making to this platform but there are some really important questions that i would hope to hear opinions for:
Are Csound - RTCMIX applications oriented towards COMPOSITION as well ?
I mean not only ambient music composition with abstract textures - i mean real time constructing and previewing of music with rich pattern content like electro or other dance fields --- In other words : Could i be able to replace windows - buzz -fruityloops -reason etc once and for all using lets say Csound ?
Or would i wait for years to hear the effect of my changes in a *.sco file ?Do the front-ends availabla override such troubles?I am kinda puzzled about how real time is implemented on applications that crunch scripted text content as note data - for example in buzz changing a note in a pattern was pretty straghtforward - but here is a whole new world with pretty scattered documentation i am afraid.

I have all the will to delve inside the numerous csound features, but what scares me is the fact that i might be looking at (almost only)software sythesis oriented things while i am looking forward to replace the functionality aforementioned in the windows platform.I am nott looking for point and click stuff - in fact the aspect of learning something like a  sound sculpting language thrills me - but would that totally replace windows ?
I would appreciate it if i was pointed to some links to perhaps dance music written with Csound or RTcmix - And of course i would really like to hear your opinion
Thank you

Title: Re: Some questions about linux music production
Post by Forum Admin on May 21st, 2003, 12:22am

Hi there!

RTcmix, just like Csound CAN be very effectively used for just about any kind of music-making process. To give you a good example of electronica kind of effect using RTcmix, try compiling it with PERL support and then try running the ../doc/sample_scos_perl/LONGCHAIN_1.pl by typing:

PCMIX < relative_path+LONGCHAIN_1.pl

This will give you a nice bass line instantaneously.

RTcmix, just like Csound can be used very effectively in real-time as well (something you'll see by yourself by testing the above example, as well as many other examples found in the ../doc dir).

That being said, both languages are being used as scripting languages only (although you can try using my RTMix front-end for assembly/post-production purposes, it really does not alleviate the inherent problem of writing the scripts out). This obviously means that their interface (if you want to call it as such) is not very user-friendly. On the other hand, the strength of such setup is that you can easily loop certain processes in order to generate large quantities of sound events by utilizing various variables, loops, and other strengths programming/scripting language has to offer.

Finally, since I am also very interested in Buzz (I've created a couple of works using it, including my latest, yet-to-be announced work), you might want to look into the "WineX" project that emulates Windows environment in Linux, and does so rather well. Some people on the linux-audio-user mailing list have reported successful utilization of Buzz via WineX. In addition, there are many other electronica Linux-native tools out there, such as Freebirth, many modular synths (spiral synth modular) etc., so you might want to look into those as well.

Hope this helps!

Ico

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