1 The World of Csound

Power, convenience, and low price—choose any two.

In the past 20 years, the personal computer has completely changed the way music is composed, recorded, stored, and shared. Music software for Macintosh, Windows, and Linux is available in (speaking metaphorically) a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes, and music software for handhelds such as the iPad is rapidly gaining in importance. But which software is the right match for your needs?

If you’re looking to get involved (or more involved) with computer-based music-making, you probably have a list of things you hope to get from the next program you download or buy. Leading the list will probably be great sound, powerful features, ease of use, and affordability.

Now for the bad news: You can’t have it all. Not in a single program, anyway. In selecting a music program that will be the focus of your creative work, you’ll have to make some tough choices. Most of today’s software is capable of producing high-quality sound, so that’s not a factor you’ll need to lose sleep over—not unless you’re producing albums for platinum-selling pop stars, and maybe not even then. Hit CDs have been and continue to be produced using very modest equipment.

In the end, your options boil down to this:

If you want power and convenience, you can purchase any number of commercial programs: multitrack audio/MIDI recorders, plug-in synthesizers, high-powered audio editors, and more. These programs sound wonderful, they’re packed with features, and the user interfaces are usually designed to let you produce finished music quickly, without worrying too much about the technical details. But they’re not free. A good DAW (digital audio workstation) will cost from $500 to $1,000, and you can easily pay as much or more for a set of software instruments. (The cost is generally far lower if you’re running the Linux operating system on your computer, but your software choices in the world of Linux will also be more limited.)

If you want convenience and low price, you can choose from a variety of very friendly entry-level programs, but you’ll have to do without the kind of high-end power features that professionals require. DAW software for Windows starts as low as $99, and many of these programs come with both software instruments and a library of loops for building tracks. Macintosh computers come with GarageBand, a free program that does multitrack recording and provides a suite of basic software instruments and recorded loops. Other software instruments are available as free downloads. (Some of them are good, others not so good.)

If, on the other hand, you crave the power of a high-end program, and you also want it at a rock-bottom price, again you have some excellent options—but be prepared to sacrifice convenience. Some of the most powerful music software available today is entirely free. One of the most important of the free power-user music programs is, of course, Csound. (For a quick look at some other options that fit in the same category, see “Alternatives” at the end of this chapter.) Csound is free to download, it runs equally well on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and you just about couldn’t find a program with more high-end features for the dedicated computer musician.

Within the last couple of years, Csound has become significantly easier to work with, thanks to “front end” programs such as CsoundQt (formerly called QuteCsound—see Chapter 5, “Using the CsoundQt Interface,” to learn to use this program) and blue (see Chapter 9, “Front Ends”), which automate some of the tasks that you formerly had to set up by hand. But “easier” is a relative term. Csound is never going to be point-and-click, and there’s an important reason for that. In point-and-click software, the designers of the program have made some musical decisions for you. They have made assumptions about what you’ll probably want to do musically. In an entry-level program, for instance, the designers may assume that you’ll be recording music in which the same time signature is used throughout a given piece, so you may not be able to switch time signatures within the piece. This is a good assumption for 98 percent of pop music, but it’s definitely a limitation. Csound, on the other hand, doesn’t assume you’ll be using a time signature at all. With Csound, pretty much every musical decision is left entirely up to you—including whether you use Csound to make music or for some other purpose. As a result, you’ll have to do some extra work.

Richard Boulanger, who teaches Csound at the Berklee College of Music, likes to say, “With Csound, the only limit is your imagination.” I once suggested to him that that slogan should be amended to, “With Csound, the only limit is your patience.” It may be true that with Csound (augmented, perhaps, by a fast computer and some good microphones) you can produce literally any music you can imagine, but getting there is not guaranteed to be a stroll in the park.