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Csound DSP Board?


sebiiksbcs

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this was about the timeframe when PC-s were 200 mhz and the Sharc 21065 was new.

I remember those times.  Creamware had launched Scope, and with a whole lot of Sharcs on board it was an amazing (and amazingly expensive) product.  It was a shame Pulsar only came out later, as I had already exhausted my computer budget by then, and never had a chance to play with their products.

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If you got lucky, Analog Devices would give you PCI card called a 'Sphinx' card with 1 SHARC on board, which would run extended CSound in real time. Less lucky you had to buy it. Creamware got in on the act, though I never knew anyone that ran one. I think John Ffitch at Bath University did some work on this too. My friend Derek Pierce used straight PC's for most of his CSound work with Beat System.

CSound is pretty hardcore, though there is nothing in synthesis that can't be done, (eventually), with it.

200MHz? Luxury! I can remember doing phase vocoding with CDP on Atari ST's. You had to set it up and let it run overnight. On memorable morning I got up to find Nibbins, our cat, fast asleep on top of the, (now overheated and crashed), Atari, and all the work lost. Cat came close to losing one of her nine lives that morning.

I still use it as a toolkit, though I've not done any music work for ages. Recently friends wanted some CD's of Pink Noise. A snip in CSound, and classic pure 3dB/Octave Pink Noise too. If you dig into the stuff that Gabriel Maldonado and Michael Gogins are doing, there is a VST version and other realtime oriented stuff.

Warning:- steep learning curve ahead!

The CSound book is pretty essential. Some of the windows front ends are broken in the latest releases, you might be better sticking to an editor in classic style.

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But my intention was, could Csound be converted into some Assembler or C stuff or whatever you programmers call it, and then run on a PIC, AVR or whatever you programmers call it?

I don't think that will be a possibility until we are using cheap ARM boards. CSound compiles on a PC, so presumably turns into Intel machine code, or some intermediate run time code that runs on a PC. This si vastly more complex that PIC or AVR. There are variants of CSound for PowerPC and some other workstations, like Sun and MIPS. It might be possible to make a stand alone instrument that way, but the I/O and control would eat a lot of cycles.

Did you ever see the late lamented Chameleon? Chameleon Website That is the sort of engine that woudl be needed - and that had a 24 bit DSP for the audio, with a Motorola 'Coldfire' - an embedded version of the 68000, for control. A bit out of the PIC range.

A few thoughts anyway.

Perhaps an older PC in a desktop style case might be rackmounted and recycled as a CSound engine.

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Interesting! Yeah, that Chameleon is sort of what I was thinking of. A programmable rack unit.

The idea about using an old PC as rack hardware I had too, but wouldn't then many workarounds be neccessary?

For example

- additional MIDI interface

- additional sound card for reasonable quality and maybe multiple outputs

- control surface based on MIOS to control rack over MIDI as well as receive parameter updates

Also, it would not really be the DIY fun thing anymore, with self-soldered PCB, programmed PIC, and so on.

Just some thoughts. Since I am observing that people start programming synths with Arduino, or do the SwinSID, AVRsyn, AVRX, I thought maybe Csound could be converted into C routines to program such a synth.

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Check out http://www.qix.synth.net for a Chameleon replacement that uses the Motorola 56k DSP.  Oh wait, it's now called the "Freescale Symphony audio processor"...  (And the old 68k chip is now called "ColdFire" - woooo...!)  Marketing...  Gotta love it!  ::)

While the 56k family has certainly been around for a long time, I'm disappointed in the Symphony SoundBite development board because of the limited RAM (can't build long delays or reverbs), so I'm sticking with the Blackfin for the moment.  The Blackfin is quite interesting, especially the STAMP board - for $220 you get a complete development kit running Linux with all the usual GNU tools and 64MB of RAM - enough for some serious fun!  http://blackfin.uclinux.org  I also really like that it's got ethernet and a web server - I use "curl" to send control messages to it over the net.  8)

It's also worth checking out the C2000 and DaVinci stuff from TI...  http://www.ti.com/dsp

Doug

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That's a mighty nice collection of resources you have there, Doug.

Cool, glad you like it.  I've added more stuff since my last post and I still have a lot more to add...

That looks interesting, especially the Anadigm stuff.  (And their corporate HQ is only about an hour and a half away from here!)  I'll have to make time to work with some of those tools...

Doug

http://www.analognotes.com/digitalnotes

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Why most topics I post seem to mutate over my head? :D But that's great: I am really happy to learn from you guys!

;D

OK, I started to add some links to learning material on my site - check out the Beginner's Guide to DSP at Analog Devices, and then check out (free!) The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing.  There are LOTS of resources on the net for audio algorithms.  For instance (especially if you're a Mac user), check out http://www.sonicbirth.com, plus all the cool stuff they're doing at places like Princeton University - http://soundlab.cs.princeton.edu/software.  Check out the Synthesis Toolkit project (from McGill, Princeton and Stanford Universities) for C and C++ code - I'm planning to use some of that with the Blackfin and/or SHARC chips...

Doug

http://www.analognotes.com/digitalnotes

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;D

OK, I started to add some links to learning material on my site - check out the Beginner's Guide to DSP at Analog Devices, and then check out (free!) The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing.  There are LOTS of resources on the net for audio algorithms.  For instance (especially if you're a Mac user), check out http://www.sonicbirth.com, plus all the cool stuff they're doing at places like Princeton University - http://soundlab.cs.princeton.edu/software.  Check out the Synthesis Toolkit project (from McGill, Princeton and Stanford Universities) for C and C++ code - I'm planning to use some of that with the Blackfin and/or SHARC chips...

Doug

http://www.analognotes.com/digitalnotes

Of course I know sonic birth and so, I also read the DSP guide a year ago. New territory for me is programming this stuff in C, or using those DSP boards and so on...

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