To my knowledge, the fidelity of the sounds you can get with Csound far exceed Supercollider. Also, Supercollider has a very restrictive license, preventing its use in basically anything besides small side and school projects, whereas Csound has a very permissive license. I have been doing a fair amount of research along these lines, and although Csound is definitely interesting in the sense of its syntax, it is, as far as I can tell, the most powerful programmatic sound system.
Csound has introduced more real-time features, and you no longer have to rely on a score to make sound. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eacyGKRBpwA
Syntax-wise, Csound very closely resembles the MUSIC-N language used by early computer musicians in the 60s. "Trapped in Convert" by Richard Boulanger was written in Csound in 1979, and to this day is able to run on the latest version of Csound.
Both Csound and SC are both very capable DSP engines, with a good core set of DSP algorithms. You can get a "good" sound out of both if you know what you are doing.
I find people who are more CS-inclined tend to prefer SuperCollider over Csound because it's actually a programming language you can be expressive in. While there have been significant syntax improvements in Csound 6, I'd still call Csound a "text-based synthesizer" rather than a "programming language".
That being said, I also think Csound lends itself to those who have more of a formal background in music. Making an instrument in an Orchestra is just like making a synthesizer patch, and creating events in a Csound score is just like composing notes for an instrument to play.
FWIW, I've never managed to get SuperCollider to stick for me. The orchestra/score paradigm of Csound just seems to fit better with how I think about music. It's also easier to offline render WAV files in Csound, which was quite helpful for me.
What? SuperCollider is GPL, so it's 100% Free Software.
> preventing its use in basically anything besides small side and school projects
Typically, people use it to create music, so the restrictions of the GPL are no concern.
> What? SuperCollider is GPL.
Exactly. That is a restrictive license, and no one is going to use it (it being Supercollider) in anything resembling a commercial product. A lot of these programmatic audio systems make their way into things like installations and video games. Supercollider can't be used in commercial instances except when you're just releasing music.
Reasonable syntax, naming, errors, etc. Csound feels like programming assembler. Yeah, you can macro and it's powerful, but... it was far from fun for me.
They're certainly both very cool, as well as their other brethren like Pure Data, Max, Audiomulch, Faust, ChucK, etc.
You don't gain almost anything with these languages in their current forms because they end up not being much different than modular patch cord synthesis with a less intuitive interface.
The amount and variety of interesting sounds I have heard from Reaktor is several orders of magnitude beyond csound to a degree it isn't even comparable.
I might even rate these early versions of AudioLM as already more interesting than csound.
The whole idea of music programming languages is a dead end IMO.
https://earslap.com/article/recreating-the-thx-deep-note.htm...
While it's mostly written in Csound, he "cheated" with the guitar track, which was a recorded sample brought into Csound.
Kind of related: https://paulbatchelor.github.io/proj/sporth
> Chorth enables Sporth to be run inside of ChucK as a Chugin.
Sporth is a stack-based language I wrote a few years ago. Stack-based languages are a great way to build up sound structures. I highly recommend trying it.
Chorth may need some fixes before it can run again. I haven't looked at it in a while, but I had a lot of fun using when I was in SLOrk.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22789920
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788893
The fact that it is effectively a modular, dataflow system is what intrigues me most about it.
If you are interested in music programming languages, have a look on the languages that Bela platform supports: Pure Data, SuperCollider, Csound, Faust,
and of course, Glicol (https://glicol.org) that I am developing :)
It's a functional language with a nice way of generating diagrams of DSP algorithms, but its big killer feature for me is its language bindings, which include C, C++, Cmajor, Codebox, CSharp, DLang, Java, JAX, Julia, JSFX, "old" C++, Rust, VHDL, and WebAssembly (wast/wasm) out of the box.
Csound: A sound and music computing system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22787566 - April 2020 (90 comments)
CSound for Android - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10794944 - Dec 2015 (12 comments)
It's unusual because it uses only SQL.
