CSound + p.c. keyboard music

Hi Gene,

You may be interested to know that I've added a
CSound save to FTS for the next release.
Lets you record a piece to a CSound rendering
as you play or retune it. A new feature
there makes it much easier to make instruments
into orchestra files - a bit of set up is needed
to make it possible for FTS to work with
a new C-Sound instrument, then after that it
can be selected from a drop list just liek a midi voice
and user can set its pan position just as they
do for midi - the user doesn't
need to edit anything - except to vary the
params if they want to do that.
FTS does all the editing needed to combine
the instruments together to make
the orchestra and to make all the necessary function table
statements and initialisationinstruments
for the scores.

Adding a new instrument also is just a matter
of a few minutes work now for most instruments.
Add a word auto to the [GLOBALS] section,
the params (identifying which are the amplitudes
and which are the frequencies) to the
[PARAMS] section,and just copy the orchestra
and head of the score to the [ORC] and
[SCO] section of the file used to descrive
the instrument for FTS - and it is then immediately
ready to use. Others need a bit more work,
but most don't seem to need much done at all
of the examples I've tried.

With ones that require zakinit and zawm
- I can't see how to do those yet,
but that seems to be the main exception
so far.

Also on your post about p.c. keyboard chords
- you can assign chords to a part in FTS
using its custom voices, and you can assign
a part to a row of a keyboard,so you can
set your p.c. keyboard up so that a row
of teh keyboard plays chords of a particular
type where you can either make them
exact tuning so that e.g. 1/1 5/4 3/2 7/4
plays the exact harmonic seventh chord
even though it may not be attuned to other
notes in the scale - ro you can set it up
to quantise the chords to the scale so
that e.g. it plays the nearest pitches to the
chord notes whatever tuning you are exploring.

There are examples of this in the new
Mouse and P.C. Keyboard Music view which
is there already in FTS 2.4.

I can add more and make it easier
to use. Inded, it would be reasonably easy
to let the user specify any chord
symbol for any position in the
keyboard indeed.

Also the functino keys aren't particularly needed
when playing from the keyboard so
I could let the user assign chords
to the function keys.

I may have a go at that for the
release of FTS 3.0 that I'm working
on right now, and add it in if it
proves easy to do, otherwise maybe
a bit later as I hope to release
it any day now, well possibly next
week say.

Robert