History of the Canonical Csound Reference Manual

This initial version of this manual for early versions of Csound was started at MIT by Barry L. Vercoe and maintained there during the 1980's and start of the 1990's. Some of the manual comes from documents for programs like Music11 from the 1970's. This original manual was improved and worked on by Richard Boulanger, John ffitch, Jean Piché and Rasmus Ekman.

This manual led to the Official Csound Reference Manual, still located at: http://www.lakewoodsound.com/csound, for Csound version 4.16, November, 1999, which was maintained by David M. Boothe.

A parallel version of the manual called the Alternative Csound Reference Manual, was developed by Kevin Conder using DocBook/SGML. This version later became the Canonical version.

When Csound was licenced as LGPL by MIT in 2003, the manual was licenced GFDL and placed on Sourceforge along with the sources of Csound.

In the winter of 2004, the Canonical Manual was converted to DocBook/XML by Steven Yi to allow for more people to be able to compile and maintain the manual.

The manual is currently maintained by Andrés Cabrera with continuous contributions from the Csound Community.

The manual continues to be a community run project that depends on the contributions of developers and users to help refine the coverage and accuracy of its contents. All contributions are welcome and appreciated.

Table 1. Other Contributors

Mike Berry
Eli Breder
Michael Casey
Michael Clark
Perry Cook
Sean Costello
Richard Dobson
Mark Dolson
Dan Ellis
Tom Erbe
Bill Gardner
Michael Gogins
Matt Ingalls
Richard Karpen
Anthony Kozar
Victor Lazzarini
Allan Lee
David Macintyre
Gabriel Maldonado
Max Mathews
Hans Mikelson
Peter Neubäcker
Peter Nix
Ville Pulkki
Maurizio Umberto Puxeddu
John Ramsdell
Marc Resibois
Rob Shaw
Paris Smaragdis
Greg Sullivan
Istvan Varga
Bill Verplank
Robin Whittle
Steven Yi
François Pinot
Andrés Cabrera
Gareth Edwards
Joachim Heintz
John ffitch
Oeyvind Brandtsegg
Menno Knevel
Felipe Sateler
And many others.

This list is by no means complete. More information can be gathered from the Changelog file in the manual's sources repository.