Csound in Ableton Live

…and now for something completely different.

As this book was being prepared for publication, a new way of using Csound was released. CsoundForLive (www.csoundforlive.com) is designed specifically to work within Ableton Live— specifically within the Max For Live environment. Max For Live embeds Cycling’74 Max/MSP within Live and is not a free component, so not all Live users will be able to take advantage of CsoundForLive.

Some of the CsoundForLive modules are free, while others are available for sale.

When a CsoundForLive plug-in is loaded into Live (see Figure 10.6), the Csound code itself can be edited using your default Csound editor: In my system, clicking on a button in the plug-in’s panel opens CsoundQt. If you need to add new knobs or sliders, you’ll find that the plug-in panel itself can be edited using the Max For Live programming interface.

Figure 10.6 Two CsoundForLive plug-ins running in Ableton Live.

Both effects and synthesizers are available in various CsoundForLive packages. A few of the plug-ins in the initial release are very nice. Others are quite simple in design and may not compare favorably with Live’s existing instrument and effect suite. The point of using CsoundForLive is that once you’re proficient in writing Csound code, you’ll be able to customize the plug-ins to meet your own needs, which you can’t do with Live’s own plug-ins.