This initial version of this manual for early versions of Csound was started at MIT by Barry L. Vercoe and maintained there during the 1980's and start of the 1990's. Some of the manual comes from documents for programs like Music11 from the 1970's. This original manual was improved and worked on by Richard Boulanger, John ffitch, Jean Piché and Rasmus Ekman.

This manual led to the Official Csound Reference Manual, still located at: http://www.lakewoodsound.com/csound, for Csound version 4.16, November, 1999, which was maintained by David M. Boothe.

A parallel version of the manual called the Alternative Csound Reference Manual, was developed by Kevin Conder using DocBook/SGML. This version later became the Canonical version.

When Csound was licenced as LGPL by MIT in 2003, the manual was licenced GFDL and placed on Sourceforge along with the sources of Csound.

In the winter of 2004, the Canonical Manual was converted to DocBook/XML by Steven Yi to allow for more people to be able to compile and maintain the manual.

The manual is currently maintained by Andrés Cabrera with continuous contributions from the Csound Community.

The manual continues to be a community run project that depends on the contributions of developers and users to help refine the coverage and accuracy of its contents. All contributions are welcome and appreciated.

This list is by no means complete. More information can be gathered from the Changelog file in the manual's sources repository.