Csound 5 has finally arrived, enjoy...

-Victor

After what has seemed a very long time (because it was...) we are releasing csound5.00 The binary, manuals and source files are on http://sourceforge.net/projects/csound and look for the csound5 files. The opportunity has been taken to tidy up the assembly of csound4.23 and earlier files and we are leaving the 4.23 files for a short while. Main message -- everyone should change to csound5. More robust, faster, more facilities, more fun, more music.

==John ffitch

Release Notes for Csound 5.00

The developers are very pleased to be releasing Csound5, for Linux (32 and 64 bit), Mac OSX and Windows, together with an uptodate manual.

The system can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/projects/csound

More details and further information can be found in the csound-develop mailing list at sourceforge and the main user mailing list ar csound@lists.bath.ac.uk

The changes from version 4.23 are extensive. The internal structure of the code has been radically changed, but the language remains compatible with Csound4, and all old orchestra/scores should run unchanged.

The main visible change is that we are using a plugin style of system. many of the opcodes are now loaded at start-up. This opens the way for private opcode libraries, and opcodes released under other licences than LGPL.

The other major change is a move to the use of external libraries where possible. All the internal code for sound files, realtime audio etc has been replaced. We are now using libsndfile for audio file I/O, and one of ALSA, PortAudio, CoreAudio, MME or ASIO for realtime. MIDI may be handled by PortMIDI as well. The incorporation of Open Sound Control facilities uses the liblo library.

A number of opcodes from csoundAV and csoundVST are now part of the main system.

Another major change is that Csound5 is embeddable in other programming systems, using an API for information linkage. We are including Python, Java and other bindings for the API. Csound5 can also have multiple instances and is re-entrant.

In addition there are a number of new opcodes, and of course bug fixes. We believe that csound5 is faster than csound4, and we encourage all users to move to it.

NOTE: IT MAY BE NECESSARY ON SOME PLATFORMS TO HAVE EITHER ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES OPCODEDIR OR OPCODEDIR64 SET TO POINT TO DIRECTORY WHERE OPCODES LIVE. THE RELEASED FILES ARE BELIEVED TO BE SAFE AND CORRECT IN THIS RESPECT BUT BEWARE!

New features:

Access to multiple ALSA devices FLTK widgets reworked and synchronised with csoundAV User defined gens with names (rather than numbers) --expression-opt command option Information on time for each phase of csound if required Command line options to set ID tags in output soundfile (title/copyright etc) Jack available as output device --sched option now accepts a priority value -+rtaudio option to select output system Many new command line options Utilities to create csd files from orc/score Tcl/TK frontends (cstclsh and cswish) Can use looping structures in WAV files as well as AIFF Increased number of possible input and output audio file formats named channels #ifdef in orchestra removed limitation of only one track in MIDI input files MIDI output can also be written to a file (this is somewhat limited) MIDI-style extra time and release (xtratim, linsegr, etc.) is now also possible with score notes string variables (of type S) automatic conversion of some C-style escape sequences (\n, \r, ASCII code in octal \ooo format, etc) in string constants made internal indexes to orchestra variables 32 bit (was 16 bit in Csound 4), allowing for larger and more complex instruments replaced old PVOC format with PVOC-EX in all related opcodes SADIR SSDIR and INCDIR can now be a colon separated list of directories

New Opcodes:

maxk tab, tabw, and tb0()..tb15() vst4cs plugin opcodes pconvolve ftconv loris opcodes Python opcodes fluid opcodes chani and chano; chnset and chnget (string indexed) GEN43 a number of pvs (streaming phase vocoder) opcodes moogladder statevar fofilter syncgrain miditempo event_i reverbsc (Sean Costello's waveguide reverb) freeverb gentune GEN operation GEN51 GEN52 diskin2 turnoff2 a-rate int() and frac(), and round(), floor(), and ceil() << and >> operators STK (Perry Cook) instruments available from original code k() function Mixer opcodes OSCrecv, OSClisten, OSCsend loop opcodes printf, printf_i string hacking opcodes

Bug Fixes:

Error in tablew fixed Minor fixed in dcblock Include files were confused by sections Improved reading of command line Fixes in dynamic fgen numbers gogobel and vibraphone amplitude fix Arguments to schewhen were wrong Better checking in bqrez minor checking in grain wguide2, wguide1 avoid very low frequencies wgpluck bug fix Some error messages corrected and typos fixed FLsetVal arguments were wrong outo missed out channel 6 fixed bugs and improved error reporting in ^+ and ^- code. kread, kdump and a number of other opcodes will take string arguments from the score bug fix in sinc window (gen20) Added iskip options to moogvcf, vco, bqrez, pareq, tbvcf and rezzy values rounded rather than truncated in deltap, comb, and delay removed spurious initial values from some MIDI opcodes Joystick was upside down lpshold and loopseg changed to agree with csoundAV marimba now allows zero probability of a multiple strike Added skipinit argument to diskin and soundin wave-terrain fixes for phase error accumulation (on long notes) new optional argument to delayr and all deltap opcodes, to allow delay taps to read from any of the nested delayr/delayw pairs, not just the last new optional argument to distort1 opcode (defaults to zero), to select amplitude scaling mode (0: default, compatible with original version; 1: relative to 0dBFS, same as mode 0 if 0dbfs is 32768; 2: unscaled) valpass fixed parameter overwriting Improved accuracy in some filters Improvements in bowedbar

JPff -- 1 Feb 2006

Files on Sourceforge

Sources: Csound5.00_src.tar.gz Csound5.00_src.zip Csound5.00_OS9_src.smi.bin Csound5.00_src_all.tar.gz (including Loris and STK code) Csound5.00_src_all.zip (including Loris and STK code)

Manual Csound5.00_manual_chm.zip Csound5.00_manual_html.zip Csound5.00_manual_pdf.zip Csound5.00_manual_pdf_A4.zip Csound5.00_manual_single_file.zip

OS9: Csound5.00_OS9.smi.bin

OSX: Csound5.00_OSX10.3.tar.gz Csound5.00_OSX10.4.tar.gz

Linux Csound5.00_i686.rpm Csound5.00_x86_64.rpm [Linux for non-root users on X86_64 Csound5.00_x86_64d.tar.gz Csound5.00_x86_64f.tar.gz ]

Windows Csound5.00_win32.i686.zip Csound5.00_win32.exe (with installed)

Victor Lazzarini Music Technology Laboratory Music Department National University of Ireland, Maynooth