Issue 15 of Csound Journal contains a group of very interesting articles, each with a distinctly different approach to the use of Csound. Martin Eastwood's article on the integration of Usine, a modular visual programming environment, with Csound, and Stéphane Rollandin's article on Surmulot, a composition environment using Csound-x, Emacs, and muO, both provide interesting and exciting new ways to interface with Csound. Aaron Krister writes about "Microsound" a command-line tool for Csound score-generation and interactive real-time performance. Jim Aiken provides a beginner's guide to phrase loops which provides instruction in several different ways to generate and manipulate phrase loops using Csound. Pieman Khosravi covers Circumpectral Sound Diffusion in preparation for a multichannel composition employing Csound, and my own article takes a looks at GNU applications and the Csound API.

The varied and interesting approaches to the use of Csound in this issue are evidence that Csound continues to thrive and flourish. I continue to say "at the end of the day...Csound just sounds good". We hope you enjoy this issue. Steven and I very much look forward to your submissions for the next issue of Csound Journal.

JamesHearon

When we first started Csound Journal, Jim and I felt that there was a genuine need to continue the tradition from Hans Mikelson's Csound Magazine to have an online publication focusing on Csound. Over the course of 15 issues, it has been amazing to see the creativity and thoughtfulness of the community in exploring so many various aspects of Csound and music-making. I think that the articles in this issue strongly carry on that tradition of exploration and development.

Regarding the community, we had a fantastic get together of Csound users and developers at this year's Linux Audio Conference in Maynooth. We had some wonderful discussions on Csound today and where to go from here, and it was a sincere pleasure to see everyone in person. It has certainly increased the excitement for the upcoming Ways Ahead: First International Csound Conference, to be held at the HMTM in Hannover, Germany from September 30th to October 2nd. I believe this conference will be extremely valuable for all who are interested in Csound and highly encourage anyone who is interested to attend.

And in addition all the wonderful content of this issue and the community events, it is worth noting the recently released FLOSS Manual for Csound. A number of members within the community have contributed a lot of time and knowledge in putting this together. I think it is an important contribution full of information for the new and seasoned user. Even though it has not been long since the 1.0 release, I know there is active work going on to further expand on the breadth and depth of the manual. Congratulations to the team of contributors on a job well done!

Steven Yi