Hi,
- Is someone here working on this kind of pd 'csound~' external project ?
Yes. Last Sunday Stefan Kersten and I managed to get csound running to and from pd using named pipes created on the fly. It works very well and we found out that it is possible to implement the very same functionality as the csound~ object for MAX/MSP (like being able to pause performance). We implemented most of it already but had some problems with option passing to csound and we would like to make it foolproof (with filecleanup etc.). But it should be ready for posting very soon (hopefully this weekend).
- Is it possible to build such an external for Pd ? (Greg, what are the main
difficulties you had to deal with ? )
- What would be the differences with Orm Finnendahl's 'piping into csound'
solution in term of performance, features and useability ?
Like I said, it's basically an extention of the former approach. The advantages are obvious: 1. The object doesn't use any csound code and therefor nobody has to deal with copyright issues concerning the pd side and 2. since it just calls an external csound process the object doesn't have to get recompiled when a new csound version is released. Apart from that it runs as stable as csound itself (while I encountered many problems with the csound~ object for MAX/MSP like crashing the mac with a simple pluck instrument whenever it gets called). But of course it should be made clear that the object is a rather simple hack and merely a demonstration of the advantages of linux pipes than anything else. It simply can't compare to the project of Matt Ingalls.
Yours, Orm