I’ve been learning Csound for about a year now, and I’ve documented my experiences in my blog at https://jasonhallen.com/blog https://jasonhallen.com/blog. My

I’ve been learning Csound for about a year now, and I’ve documented my experiences in my blog at https://jasonhallen.com/blog https://jasonhallen.com/blog. My first three blog posts talk about 1) why I chose Csound over Max/MSP, SuperCollider, and ChucK, 2) how mysterious the online presence of Csound is, and 3) what resources have been most helpful for me as I’ve learned Csound. I love Csound, but it has been very challenging to learn. The first two or three months were an uphill battle where I thought about quitting a few times. Admittedly, I was brand new to both computer programming and digital audio generation. I’m sure if I had more experience with those then picking up Csound wouldn’t have been as painful. The biggest early challenge for me was understanding how the three variable rates (initialization rate, control rate, and audio rate) work. I felt like I had to hit my head against a wall for three weeks before that clicked. But once you become familiar with the basic principles and syntax of Csound you start picking up other topics and opcodes quicker. I’ve used both CsoundQt and Cabbage as Csound development environments. They each have their pros and cons and best use cases. I’ve been using Cabbage more because it has an ingenious way of controlling the instrument interface within the Csound code itself. There are a ton of opcodes available to do many sound design techniques out of the box, or you can code your own opcodes to do anything you’d like. The user community is very responsive and helpful on the Csound listserv (http://csound.1045644.n5.nabble.com/ http://csound.1045644.n5.nabble.com/). And the developers have made it so you can integrate Csound with all sorts of other languages and software.