drapeau@jessica.stanford.edu (George D. Drapeau) (08/10/89)
I have just placed an application called XMusic on expo for public ftp access. This version of the program is the first X11 port of an earlier, X10 program I wrote about a year and a half ago. XMusic is a graphical front end to the Csound package. Briefly, Csound is a music compiler written by Barry Vercoe at MIT's Media Lab. The Csound package allows you to compose music on your workstation (although you'll need a digital-to-analog converter to hear the resulting sound files). Compositions are comprised of two files: the orchestra file that defines the behavior of instruments, and the score file which denotes which instruments will play what. This is a simplification of Csound; for a more thorough treatment, I suggest that interested people obtain the distribution from ems.media.mit.edu (18.85.0.6). I got the distribution from there some time last year. XMusic only addresses the creation of orchestra files; it is still up to the composer to create the score files. At the time I created the first version of XMusic for the USC Music Department, the thinking was that there would be other tools to perhaps convert MIDI data into Csound score format, or converters from popular score editing formats into Csound format. I should point out, however, that Csound is certainly not limited to what popular score editors can produce. The version of XMusic on expo was written for X11R3 using the X Toolkit. It still needs work, and the application is not as considerate as it should be (this was my first attempt at writing an application using the X Toolkit), but I may not have the time to do significant improvements soon. If you have comments or suggestions about the application, I'd love to hear them. I hope you enjoy XMusic. ______________________________________________________________________________ George D. Drapeau Internet: drapeau@jessica.stanford.edu Academic Information Resources Stanford University