Hi all,

If you've been reading the yahoo tuning list(s) for years you may remember some time back I wrote a program initially called 'et_compose'  which became 'micro_composer'...well, now I have an application designed for the specific purpose of avoiding the channel and micrtonal limitiations of MIDI altogether by using CSound as an engine.

Since it uses typing of characters, it made sense to move away from MIDI, b/c one didn't need the physical MIDI equipment anyway, thus it made sense to also do away with it's built-in limitations in other areas.

Csound is known for it's steep learning curve, hopefully, this makes things easier not only for the general user but the microtonal composer as well.

One particularly useful feature of this program is the ability to audition musical passages, chords, etc. in realtime, using the -i command line option (see the docs below for other features and more info)

Links:

Actual application script:
http://www.akjmusic.com/packages/microcsound20090707.tgz

Online tutorial w/examples (included in .tgz package):
http://www.akjmusic.com/microcsound_tutorial.txt

README file w/install instructions, etc (included in .tgz package).
http://www.akjmusic.com/microcsound_README.txt

One needs, as prerequisites:

Csound, of course
Python

.....It's designed for Linux/Unix, which means it ought to work well for Mac OS-X well (beta testing anyone?)...I haven't tested on Windows, but you can try it out...I assume it wouldn't need much modification other than directory pathname conventions using backslashes instead of forward slashes, but one never knows what hidden bugs are there with cross-platform development.

Let me know what you think, and if the documentation is clear/complete enough for you.....


Aaron Krister Johnson
http://www.akjmusic.com
http://www.untwelve.org