[PD] PD+Csound related questions

[Orm Finnendahl]

Hi,

> - Is someone here working on this kind of  pd 'csound~' external project ?
> 

Yes. Last Sunday Stefan Kersten and I managed to get csound running to
and from pd using named pipes created on the fly. It works very well
and we found out that it is possible to implement the very same
functionality as the csound~ object for MAX/MSP (like being able to
pause performance). We implemented most of it already but had some
problems with option passing to csound and we would like to make it
foolproof (with filecleanup etc.). But it should be ready for posting
very soon (hopefully this weekend).

> - Is it possible to build such an external for Pd ? (Greg, what are the main
> difficulties you had to deal with ? )
> 
> - What would be the differences with Orm Finnendahl's 'piping into csound'
> solution in term of performance, features and useability ?

Like I said, it's basically an extention of the former approach. The
advantages are obvious: 1. The object doesn't use any csound code and
therefor nobody has to deal with copyright issues concerning the pd
side and 2. since it just calls an external csound process the object
doesn't have to get recompiled when a new csound version is
released. Apart from that it runs as stable as csound itself (while I
encountered many problems with the csound~ object for MAX/MSP like
crashing the mac with a simple pluck instrument whenever it gets
called). But of course it should be made clear that the object is a
rather simple hack and merely a demonstration of the advantages of
linux pipes than anything else. It simply can't compare to the project
of Matt Ingalls.

Yours,
Orm