in case you didn't see it on freshmeat, sfront has been released from
cs.berkeley.edu.
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro/sa/index.html
sfront is a compiler for SAOL (aka MP4-SA), a language from Eric
Scheirer, a grad student of Vercoe's at MIT and is now the "next" MPEG
compression standard. its a language very, very much like Csound,
though with some distinct improvements. sfront takes your ".orc" and
".sco" files (they have different suffixes under SAOL) and produces a
C program that is "highly optimized for generating the desired
audio/MIDI output".
sfront comes with excellent documentation (an online book!), and looks
like a really nice piece of work.
however, the curmudgeon in me feels compelled to say this: i think
that sfront's authors spent a lot of time working on sfront. i know
that eric spent a lot of time working on the language spec, as did
other people associated with the standard. they've done an excellent
job. but i find myself reading the sfront docs, with all its
Csound-derived talk of "i-rate", "a-rate" and "k-rate", and thinking
"oh no. please don't perpetuate this confusing, unnecessary set of
concepts from Csound into the 21st century".
i did write a much longer section that explained why, but decided it
wasn't appropriate here. i sent it to sfront's authors instead.
--p
