[Musickit-developer] Re: CsoundVST for PCs made me think...

[Ronald C.F. A. <rc...@cu...>]

Hi,

thanks for your detailed reply. Obviously it wasn't the intention of
my idea to derail an approach that's superior, particularly in the
long term. And I follow your arguments for SAOL.
On the other hand, SAOL has been talked about for a few years, and
unless I'm unaware of what has happened since (well possible) it
still seems to be on the far horizon.
CSound on the other hand has been ported to MacOS X, and there is
a shared library version almost ready. That led me to the conclusion
that with some glue code for either VST or CoreAudio, Csound
could be (ab)used as a synthesis engine for MK and a variety of
soon-to-be-available commercial offerings, such as Logic Audio.
I thought this was particularly interesting given the number of
ready to use CSound patches that float around.
Given what Max/MSP seems to be able to do with CSound, using it
just for the synth-patch part should be possible.

Now how close is sfront to Csound? Will it be possible to
automatically convert a Csound synth patch to sfront?

To sum it up: the main gist of the idea was threefold
a) to get something in terms of software synthesis working rather sooner
    than later
b) being able to tap into a large library of existing patches
c) being able to share patches between MusicKit and "industry standard"
    applications.

Of course c) will be a mute point if the sfront/SAOL stuff will be
CoreAudio, which hopefully will be supported by most important
standard apps, even though VST won't go away soon, simply because
it allows some code to be shared between Wintel machines and Macs.

Which brings up another question: is the current plan to emulate
CoreAudio on Windows, or will certain features simply not available
on that platform (not that *I* would care...)

Greetings,

Ronald

PS: the new DP Macs look rather nice for native signal processing. ;-)
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