Getting Started with Csound

What you need

Csound comes preinstalled in the XO and it is used internally by other activities like TamTam, so the XO comes ready to use all the material in this manual. This manual can be browsed online here, but it might be a good idea to download it as a content bundle, because it will be accessible fast and offline.

Running

Csound can be run in different ways. Csound can be called from a terminal, or from a graphical front-end. A front-end is a graphical program that assists running Csound and can usually help edit csound files, like Pippy or the Csound Editor Activity.

To use Csound from the command line, you must open the Terminal activity. You can try the example files included with this manual line by navigating to the examples directory of the manual:

cd /home/olpc/Library/csound5.08_manual_xo/examples

and then typing:

csound oscils.csd

This will make csound play the file "oscils.csd". You can see the long list of examples available by typing:

ls

which lists all the contents in the current directory.

Editing and writing your own csd files

Csound reads text files which contain instructions for producing sound. These files usually have the extension ".csd" and are called csd files. They can be created and edited using simple text editors like Pippy or the Csound Editor.

Csound's .csd files contain 3 main sections contained within <CsSynthesizer> and </CsSynthesizer> tags:

Note that anything after a semicolon (;) until the end of the line is a comment, and is ignored by Csound.

You can write csd files in any plain text editor like notepad or textedit. Just be sure to save the file as plain text (not rich text). Many frontends include advanced editing capabilities with syntax highlighting and completion.