4 ms·

You often find it in the heart of VST/AU plugins, within ios and android apps. Now it can work from the web. Its also heavily used in games for programmatic sou

You often find it in the heart of VST/AU plugins, within ios and android apps. Now it can work from the web. Its also heavily used in games for programmatic sound effects. But its more of a library or framework for audio/midi rather than a full blown user facing system like Max/MSP.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
VST/AUs are more likely to be written from scratch, often inside a wrapper like JUCE to abstract away the OS-specific details. CSound is a grab-bag of mediocre DSP algos hacked together from various sources by academics who have no interest in professional production values. While you can build your own synths with Csound, they don't usually sound very good. Games are actually more likely to use PDLib, although there's also a lot of custom C++ in some games. There's a significant difference in sophistication between the crude algos in Csound and the algos in successful commercial VSTs like Serum, Uhe's synths, the Roland Cloud collection, SoftTube, UAD, and FabFilter mixing tools, and so on.
- sramsay 7y ago
  > There's a significant difference in sophistication between the crude algos in Csound and the algos in successful commercial VSTs like Serum, Uhe's synths, the Roland Cloud collection, SoftTube, UAD, and FabFilter mixing tools, and so on. I don't know about "crude," but yeah. And honestly? There is no comparison between the components in Max/Pd/sc/ChuCK and any of this stuff either (I joke with my art-music friends that I like everything about Max except the sound ;). You'll never hear something like Cytomic's The Drop (a filter that can crush your CPU) or serious tape saturation, or sophisticated EQ curves with lots of warmth and character. It's true that you could create any kind of filter, oscillator, DSP-whatever you want with these systems, but in practice, the people working with these tools are not U-he-level DSP programmers, and it shows. I wish that weren't true, because I'd much rather code stuff csound-style than work in a DAW with a bunch of expensive plugins. But is it true that you can run VSTs in csound? Could you use commercial VSTs, but write fancy controllers in csound?

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago

VST/AUs are more likely to be written from scratch, often inside a wrapper like JUCE to abstract away the OS-specific details. CSound is a grab-bag of mediocre DSP algos hacked together from various sources by academics who have no interest in professional production values. While you can build your own synths with Csound, they don't usually sound very good. Games are actually more likely to use PDLib, although there's also a lot of custom C++ in some games. There's a significant difference in sophistication between the crude algos in Csound and the algos in successful commercial VSTs like Serum, Uhe's synths, the Roland Cloud collection, SoftTube, UAD, and FabFilter mixing tools, and so on.

sramsay 7y ago
> There's a significant difference in sophistication between the crude algos in Csound and the algos in successful commercial VSTs like Serum, Uhe's synths, the Roland Cloud collection, SoftTube, UAD, and FabFilter mixing tools, and so on. I don't know about "crude," but yeah. And honestly? There is no comparison between the components in Max/Pd/sc/ChuCK and any of this stuff either (I joke with my art-music friends that I like everything about Max except the sound ;). You'll never hear something like Cytomic's The Drop (a filter that can crush your CPU) or serious tape saturation, or sophisticated EQ curves with lots of warmth and character. It's true that you could create any kind of filter, oscillator, DSP-whatever you want with these systems, but in practice, the people working with these tools are not U-he-level DSP programmers, and it shows. I wish that weren't true, because I'd much rather code stuff csound-style than work in a DAW with a bunch of expensive plugins. But is it true that you can run VSTs in csound? Could you use commercial VSTs, but write fancy controllers in csound?