wxCsound Overview

The wxCsound program is a operating system neutral graphical user interface for Csound. The program is built on top of wxWindows, and its use is governed by the same license used by Csound, the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

The wxCsound program presents a user with four windows selectable using the tabs named below.

Settings: This window is used to configure a Csound task. A task using the specified configuration is started by selecting the "Run Task" item in the "Action" menu. The Settings window is described in more detail later.
Transcript: This window shows the output of a Csound task. This window is cleared by selecting the "Clear Transcript" item in the "Action" menu.
Plots: This window displays plots generated by a Csound task. The combination box in the window is used to select among the plots available for viewing.
Messages: This window displays log messages generated by the graphical user interface. Check here for detailed error messages when things go wrong.

The Settings Window

The bottom line of the Setting window always shows the command line specified by the current configuration. The line above it shows the file name associated with the current configuration when the configuration has been read from or written to a file.

A configuration is saved to a file by selecting either the "Save" or "Save As" item in the "File" menu. A configuration is recovered from a file by either selecting the "Open" item in the "File" menu, or starting wxCsound with the file as its only command line argument. By default, wxCsound configuration file names have the extension .csc.

Csound Configuation (CSC) files

This program saves configuations in Csound Configuation (CSC) format. A configuration is sequence of words separated by spaces or tabs, and terminated by a newline or carriage return character.

A word is a sequence of alphanumeric characters, and the following characters:

    @ _ , - + = : , . , /

Other characters can be included by preceding the character with back slash (\). Files in CSC format encode characters using UTF-8.

There are options provided by CSC format that cannot be specified using the graphical user interface. You can edit CSC files and specify these options. To see the complete list of options, request help on CSC syntax.

Running wxCsound

When starting wxCsound in a shell, one can optionally provide an initial Csound configure by naming a CSC file.

    $ wxcsound [csound-config-file]

On Windows, wxCsound can be invoked from the Start Menu, or by clicking on a CSC file.

Obtain version information with the following command.

    $ wxcsound -v

Copyright Notice

Csound: Copyright (C) 1991-2002 Barry Vercoe, John ffitch, and other members of the Csound community.
wxWindows: Copyright (C) 1992-2002 Julian Smart, Robert Roebling, Vadim Zeitlin, and other members of the wxWindows team. Portions (C) 1996 Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute.

This software is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this software; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA.