WinXound

In spite of its name, WinXound is not strictly a Windows program. It’s cross-platform. Developed by Stefano Bonetti, it can be downloaded from http://winxound.codeplex.com.

WinXound (see Figure 9.5) is less ambitious than CsoundQt and far less ambitious than blue, but it has some strong features that will make it the right choice for some users. You can work on your .csd files in its text editor with user-configurable syntax coloring. The main edit window has multiple tabs for keeping several files open at once, and the view of a single file can be split horizontally or vertically. When your code contains errors, you’ll find that WinXound is better than the current version of CsoundQt at finding and highlighting the lines where the errors are located.

The program has context-sensitive opcode help, auto-completion of code lines, a detachable help/ output window, bookmarks for code lines, one-click font size zooming, the obligatory dialog box for running Csound’s audio analysis tools, and a built-in display of the Csound manual. (Don’t try switching to the frames version—that will crash WinXound.)

The entire Csound UDO code repository is bundled with WinXound. It opens up in its own pane in the help/output window, and you can drag opcodes out of it into your own code (or insert your own opcodes into the local copy of the repository).

WinXound has no dialog box tools for making settings. The program expects you to tell Csound what MIDI and audio devices (and related settings) to use, using the standard command-line flags. This can be done either in the <CsOptions> area of your .csd file or in a command-line field in the Settings box.

Figure 9.5 The WinXound front end features a multi-tabbed text editor with user-configurable syntax coloring, as shown in the Settings dialog box at right. The lower pane of the main window can display the Csound manual, output messages, an opcode directory, or the code repository (shown).