Installing CsoundQt

Before you start exploring Csound, you’ll most likely want to install the latest version of the CsoundQt front end. This step is not strictly necessary, as there are other ways to use Csound. But there are two strong reasons to do it. First, CsoundQt provides an excellent environment in which to learn Csound. It has numerous friendly features, but they won’t get in the way of your learning the basics of writing Csound code. Second, most of the examples in this book will use CsoundQt, either explicitly or by implication. If you don’t install it, you’ll have a harder time working your way through the book.

Go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/qutecsound/files. (Note: At present, this directory still refers to CsoundQt by its old name, QuteCsound. At some point in the future, the directory may change to reflect the new name.) The most current pre-compiled version for your OS should be displayed as a link near the top of the window. The installation process is similar to the process for installing Csound itself, so there’s no need to go into it here. Also as with Csound itself, the installer might not have been upgraded to the latest version of the program, because CsoundQt is developed and maintained entirely by unpaid volunteers. At this writing, CsoundQt version 0.7 is in testing, and it will probably be released by the time you read this. Most of this book was written, however, using the previous version (which had a different name), QuteCsound 0.6.1 for Mac OS and 0.6.0 for Windows.