Basic information about CsoundAV

by Gabriel Maldonado
http://csounds.com/maldonado


General  (IMPORTANT! Read this first if you are trying CsoundAV for the first time!)

History of changes and new features of this version of Csound

Command line arguments

Examples of command-line calls of CsoundAV

Command Line Hints

Acknowledgements


General

CsoudAV is provided in four types of executables, distributed in different zipped archives:

CsoundAV_Win.exe - Win32 GUI version with 32-bit floating-point precision
CsoundAV_Win64.exe - Win32 GUI version with 64-bit floating-point precision
CsoundAV_Con.exe - Win32 console version with 32-bit floating-point precision
CsoundAV_Con64.exe - Win32 console version with 64-bit floating-point precision

The more stable could be CsoundAV_Win.exe because it is the reference version for testing and debugging.

To run CsoundAV_Win.exe and CsoundAV_Win64.exe it is sufficient double-clicking the program icon. See the GUI section for more information.
Alternatively you can write a batch file or use a special program to run Csound.

CsoundAV_Con.exe and CsoundAV_Con64.exe don't have GUI, so, to run them, you must type a command-line with several arguments from a DOS window. Note that command line arguments are not optional, but necessary with these executables of CsoundAV.

Since version 2.5 of Csound a unified orc/sco file feature was implemented. Actually, you can run CsoundAV simply dragging the .csd file to the executable file icon. In this case the necessary command line flags are embedded into the .csd file, so the only command line arguments are the executable name (i.e. csound.exe) and the .csd file itself.

Even if you already know standard Csound, you have to carefully read all the additional features of this version. Please, ask me about eventual problems ONLY after reading all these documents.

If you don't know Csound you MUST study the main manual at first. Notice that this distribution doesn't contain main Csound manual! I suggest to read tutorials at first (there are a lot in the following links), because Csound is not so easy to use. You can get main manual at the following urls:

http://hem.passagen.se/rasmuse/Csound.htm (WinHelp format);

http://www.lakewoodsound.com/csound (PDF format);

You can find tutorials and a lot of resources at:

http://www.csound.org

http://www.csounds.com

Keep it in mind that Csound is a very complex software. So, learning it may take a lot of time. Keep it in mind that, even if you perfectly know Csound, you have to study the documentation included in this distribution too, because there are many additional things to know, especially regarding command-line flags, new spatialization-related opcodes, widget opcodes and OpenGL graphics stuff.