John ffitch

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Not sure -- perhaps forcing a release? I think OSC is important.

[Editor's note: John is being modest here. John provided organization and direction for the project including setting up the Sourceforge site. He moved many of the opcodes from Csound 4 into separate loadable modules. John revised Csound's audio file reading/writing code and real-time code to use the libsndfile, PortAudio, and PortMidi libraries. He also did a fair amount of work paving the way for multiple-instantiation and reentrancy in the Csound library. John added commandline options for new file formats and for setting orchestra and score macros. A new "software bus" for communications between hosts and Csound was designed and implemented by John. He wrote opcodes for the software bus, OSC, and a few others. He worked with Erik de Castro Lopo to get looping support into libsndfile. He provided support for #ifdef in orchestra code and for dynamically loaded GEN routines. John wrote an installer for Linux systems and provides pre-compiled Linux packages for both 32-bit and 64-bit CPUs. Finally, John did major work on writing a new orchestra parser for Csound that will be incorporated once it is finished.]

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Andres Cabrera

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Michael Gogins

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My vision for the future of Csound is: everyone will standardize on version 5, Csound 5 will become a normal part of Linux distributions, people will begin distributing plugin opcodes independently of Csound, someone will develop a set of GigaSampler opcodes, someone will develop a clustering system for Csound using the API that will enable massive speedups in offline rendering, people will settle on a standard set of pfields to enable the exchange of instrument definitions, someone will implement OSC on Windows, someone will do a Rewire interface for Csound using the API... in general, I hope and expect that Csound will become integrated into more and more studio environments, and be used not just by computer music specialists but by film composers, commercial producers, and others.

In the long run I would like to see one well-known PROGRAMMABLE software synthesizer with the same kind of power as Csound become a standard part of commercial notation and sequencing software, either as a plugin or as a builtin. I do not really care if it is Csound, SuperCollider, or something new. But it needs to be both flexible and standard so that the language becomes, in essence, a new form of music notation understood by most musicians. This will apply both to synthesis methods and to composition methods.

Victor Lazzarini

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Anthony Kozar

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John Ramsdell

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Istvan Varga

[Editor's note: Istvan did not send me a profile, so the following is my own summary of his contributions to Csound 5. It is likely incomplete due to the enormous number of improvements that he made.]

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Steven Yi

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When Csound 5 first got started it was a bit of a rough transition. Most of my efforts then were to try to ask good questions that would help clarify what everyone was working on. I spent a great deal of my time at the beginning compiling Csound 5 on the platforms I had available to me (which was primarily Linux and Windows and occasionally OS X) and reporting any issues I had, whether it was the build system, broken opcodes, or any other bugs and differing behavior that Csound 5 had compared to Csound 4. I view my contributions to Csound 5 as being mostly in the department of testing and trying to ask good questions of the developers as well as helping others who were getting into Csound 5 themselves.

In terms of opcodes, I did have a hand in the current set of opcodes based on fluidsynth. They were originally created by Michael Gogins but I had a different use case so I modified them to produce a second wrapping; we eventually managed to merge our efforts to what exists now. I also played a small part in a few other opcodes which were mostly implemented by Istvan Varga (string-indexed software bus, ftgentmp), but my role there was mostly as a user making requests and discussing implementation details.

I also helped a little bit with the transition to using Sourceforge for Csound and did work on the build system. Also, when Kevin Conder moved on from maintaining the Alternative Csound Reference Manual, with a little help from him at the start, I continued on with that work and did the transition from Docbook SGML to Docbook XML and worked out the new toolchain to use for building the manual. This seemed to help the manual efforts a great deal as others had better luck setting up an XML toolchain than they did an SGML toolchain, so others were more inclined to get involved with working on the manual. I continue to do builds and releases of the manual as well as help others when they contribute to it.

[Editor's Note: Steven also did some work on modularizing the opcodes and eliminating globals.]

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I think Csound as a program is now in as great a shape as its ever been. Looking forward, I'd like to see support for multiple processors and eventually multiple computers for rendering Csound projects. As efficient a tool as Csound is (and it *is* a very efficient program), due to the things I'm working on musically with my Orchestral Composition library and blue, I find that I'm bumping into limits of what my CPU can do in realtime which affects my music-making experience. Multicore CPU's are becoming more affordable and widely available and I'd love to be able to take advantage of that.

Csound is a very mature and rich tool for making music. I've been very satisfied in working with it and think that the future is very bright for Csound. I'm looking forward to making music with the tool for years and years to come.