The motivation of Blue Live is that I wanted to be able to test ideas with the instruments of my current work file and do so in a way that would be easy for me to take my tests and put them in to use for composition. One possible solution to my problem could be to make instruments my instruments multipurposed as to be triggerable by MIDI and SCO. That way I could play the instruments in realtime via MIDI and then, having found some ideas I liked, start working in SCO.

However, in working out ideas this way I would still have to spend time to notate in SCO the ideas I was working out in MIDI. Also, I found working out ideas on the note level to be hard to work out with MIDI controllers. (The flipside was also true, though, and working on the level of the sound would sometimes be better off by using MIDI than using SCO.)

Blue Live solved my compositional problems by letting me test out ideas with writing SCO and using them in realtime. That way, after working with the ideas, I could directly transfer the ideas to my score timeline and work with them in the context of the piece at hand.

Also, I found I enjoyed performing with Blue Live, as I found it a comfortable level of abstraction to work with.

Blue Live is designed to work with the rest of your blue project file. All aspects of your regular blue file that would normally be written out to a CSD file are done so except SCO text that would be generated from the score timeline. The global score are will be written out, but instead of <TOTAL_DUR> being calculated from the score timeline, a default value of 3600 is used. This allows your notes that would be used for effects instruments to run for 3600 seconds (this size can be altered if anyone needs be; just email me a request).

So in the Blue Live dialog, you'll see a textfield for a commandline at the top, a start/stop button, an area to add/remove soundObjects, and an area for the editors of those soundObjects.

The commandline is the Csound command you'll use to run Csound with the temp CSD file that is generated. This command must have "-L stdin" as part of its arguments for Csound to expect SCO input from stdin, which blue uses to send SCO text to Csound. The default command of "csound -Wdo devaudio -L stdin" should work as a basic start.

The start/stop button will start Csound using the user-given commandline and will run it with a temporary CSD file generated from the blue project file (minus the SCO from the score timeline). If already running, the button will stop the previous performance. Also, if you close the dialog while Csound is running, the dialog will stop the performance.

The main black window holds your soundObjects. Right-Clicking in the main area will bring up a dialog for adding soundObjects. The soundObject GUI's that are added when adding soundObjects in this area consist of a large trigger button that will generate notes from the soundObject and pass it to Csound via stdin, as well as a label. Clicking the label once will bring up the soundObject's editor in the bottom part of the window. Double-Clicking the label will allow you to edit the name of the soundObject.

Blue Live uses a subset of the same soundObjects that are available on the score timeline within the main editing window of blue. Some possible ways you could explore ideas are:

All objects are set to generate as if their time behavior was set to none, meaning no scaling or repetition is done