Does anyone use CSound? My old music teacher told me about it during my visit to New York last weekend. I have already installed CSound and have money saved for a book on it, which I plan to buy this week. My goal is to learn it as much as I can of it during the summer and use it for composition as soon as possible.

Does anyone use it or have experience with it and wants to share tips or opinions?

You may want to check out related products before committing to CSound, although I haven't used it so I can't weigh its relative pros and cons. As far as I can tell, it doesn't have the multimedia capabilities of Max/MSP/Jitter (http://www.cycling74.com/), but if all you're interested in is sound synthesis, it should be fine (and I'm sure you aren't going to like the price tag of Max). You may also want to check out Miller Puckett's PureData (http://www.puredata.org), a related product that is free, or SuperCollider (although I'm pretty sure that's Mac only).

I will download CSound later on though, and let you know what I think.

You may want to check out Ircam as a general point of interest -- it's basically ground zero for this sort of thing: http://www.ircam.fr/?L=1

I'd heard about Pure Data, something about it being a predecessor of MAX/MSP. I saw a show by a guy who used nothing but Pure Date for everything. Thanks for the link... I downloaded it, I'll give it a spin.

Pure Data isn't too much different from Max/MSP, and it came after Max/MSP as far as I know, not that it makes a difference. They're all based on the same basic foundation. Just don't use jMax -- I'm fairly certain that development has stopped for that project.

I rather like SuperCollider 3, which is more like CSound than either Max/MSP or PD.