This really should be in the blue forum. But since that doesn't exist, I figured that this would be the best place to get help.
I've been composing music for about eight or so years now on a handful of different platforms, from a guitar to garage band to renoise to ableton... and I recently realized something about the twelve tone scale that I rather dislike. I then discovered that every program I have ever used requires composition with that scale. I looked around for alternatives and stumbled upon csound. After reading most of the manual and a couple of simple tutorials I realized how powerful this programming language really is. I then stumbled upon blue and realized how it captures every aspect of csound in terms of sheer power and enables one to compose in a much less structured way (than, of course, entering a list of notes and p-fields). I downloaded csound (and screwed around a bit, to get an idea of what i was getting into) and then downloaded blue.
Blue enables automation and widgets. However, this is only true when the csound API is used. To do that, one needs to enter the location of his/her csnd.jar file and uncomment a couple of lines in a file. Sounds trivial, huh? It would be, if blue.bat (or blue.sh, even blue.command) existed anywhere on my computer. So, my question is (after a longwinded introduction of myself to these forums), where are these starter files?
I am running csound 5.11 (the newest possible version that runs on mac os 10.4) and blue 2.0.9.
Csound API
Hi aquowf, welcome to the world of Csound. Let me assure you that ,in my opinion, if you are interested in microtonal composition you have made the right choice moving to Csound/blue. In fact I would guess that the majority of Csound composers are primarily into microtonal. Within Csound/blue 12-TET assumes it's proper significance, as one possible tuning out of an infinity of possible tunings.
You only need to check the checkbox in the dropdown menu to enable the Csound API. That just allows realtime adjustment of automation parameters ,like twisting automation knobs in realtime while the song plays on realtime render. I leave it on all the time myself, finding it very useful for enabling realtime adjustment of volume levels using the mixer, and this is a quick easy way to test if the API is working. Non-realtime automation does NOT require the Csound API to be enabled. I am running on Windows, but in blue2 the Windows version does not even have a csnd.jar anymore, and I certainly did not need to edit any files to get automation working. Although aside from the mixer I don't really use the realtime automation much, there may be bugs I am unaware of. You are looking at old v1 documentation that I think no longer is valid.
Unfortunately these forums don't seem to get read much by most of the Csound gurus. I suggest you join up with both the Csound and blue mailing lists to ask any questions. Steven Yi may add a forum to the new blue website, but it does not have one yet. I can definitely attest to the fact that Steven answers questions on the mailing list on nearly a daily basis.
http://bwong.ca