A while back, I posted about a script I wrote in Ruby to convert standard midifiles to Csound scores (http://www.csounds.com/node/87). Some people seem to have found it useful, so you might like to know that I've made a bit of an update.

[This might be better posted in a forum, but as they seem to have disappeared from the front page...]

I'm writing a Csound app, possibly for The Tech Museum in San Jose, and I want to demo it there soon. However, I'm using Linux, and it sounds as if they only have PCs and Macs, and I will have to install Csound on whichever machine is to be used.

As I don't use either OS personally (and have no good access to either), it'd be a good idea to know of any obstacles before I go down there and spen a fruitless afternoon trying to get things to work!

A couple of weeks ago someone posted about the problems they were having, getting Cubase to understand a midifile generated by Csound. It turns out that Csound uses the rather rare "SMPTE" scheme to specify the tick rate, and many apps don't seem to know about this, like Cubase -- and one I use that actually plays the file backward!

This sparked me into writing a little utility to convert SMPTE into the more usual "ticks-per-beat" specification, based on my Ruby package for processing midifiles, and it seems to work quite well.

... being an account of my adventures in getting Csound 5 up and running on my Ubuntu Linux system.

I've never really moved from Csound 4 to Csound 5 to this point, because for one thing 5 doesn't run on BeOS, which is my main system. (There's no real reason it can't run there, except for getting scons all set up, and probably some updating of the real-time connectivity. I started on scons at one time, but never got all the way there.) Anyway, now that I have Ubuntu Linux on my other box, I thought that I should at least be up-to-date there.

I noticed the reference to this in this other thread, and I think I misread the "cross-platform" comment. Is it only "cross-Intel/PPC Mac" at the moment? I downloaded the alpha [I couldn't find the announced beta anywhere], and although sources seem to be there, they're in a very unfamiliar directory structure (to a Linux-oriented person), so I assume it's directed only to the Mac.

Just a note, if anyone is interested, that I've improved (I think!) the "Rotor Organ" I developed from Hans Mikelson's original code.

I've edited the original blog post, so you can find the code and other details there.

I think it's about time I posted this, as it's been sitting around here for some time, and sees quite a bit of use.
[Updated 3 Dec 2008 -- see end of full posting.]

A year or so back, I was getting all frustrated because I couldn't find anything that I could play from keyboard that really sounded like the Hammond organs I was hearing on record. The one on my new digital piano was particularly awful. Then I came across Hans Mikelson's "Rotor Organ" here, and a lot of my frustration disappeared.

Hi -- I'm new here, but I hope this might be of interest to some people. One thing I've never been particularly good at is creating interesting Score files to test Orchestras with, and it struck me that existing standard midifiles might be a good starting point.

I figured something for this ought to exist already, and searching the web turned up a link or two, but they all arrived at dead ends, so I wrote my own. The Ruby language seemed to be a natural medium for this (especially as I'd already written a midifile handling module).