[PlanetCCRMA] CM vs Grace

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Thu, 2008-09-25 at 17:17 -0700, Jeff Sandys wrote:
> What is the difference between CM as installed from:
> http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/mirror/fedora/linux/planetccrma/8/i386/repoview/cm.html
> and Grace from this link?
> http://camil.music.uiuc.edu/Software/grace/

I don't know enough to tell you. The Common Music packaged in Planet
CCRMA is quite old and many many changes (many non-backward compatible)
have happened since then. Common Music has been historically (IMHO)
quite "fluid", with new interfaces and APIs coming and going through its
life, usually with no consideration for backwards compatibility. 

> I am trying to follow along with Rick Taube's Algorithmic Design of Music
> class:
> http://camil.music.uiuc.edu/Classes/404A1/
> and his Notes from the Meta level book.
> 
> I couldn't build Grace (source from the site above) on my Fedora 8/CCRMA
> laptop 

What problem did you find?

> and neither of the Linux binarys (built for Ubuntu) would work.  (It
> would really be cool if someone could put a Grace package in CCRMA)

I would love to but I have yet to find the time. There is now "demand"
for it so I may bump it in priority :-) But Common Music has always be
somewhat painful to package, I imagine its new versions would not be any
better in that respect. 

> Common Music (from the repoview above) is installed and seems to work OK,
> will this be adequate?

I think it will be missing things. 

> The differences I perceive is that SAL is not available so I will have to
> convert all the SAL code to Scheme or Lisp.  
> When I run CM it starts with SBCL instead of Guile, but it acts like Scheme,
> is this by design?  

This is by design. There is a (thin) layer that emulates part of scheme.
Actually Common Music is written in scheme but is translated on the fly
to Common Lisp when it is compiled. 

> Are all the functions used in the Meta level book and the class notes
> available in CCRMA CM environment? (especially the csound, midi and spawn
> functions that are beyond my coding capabilities)

I don't know what is in the class notes, I imagine most of the stuff
would not be in the CCRMA packages, they are too old and Rick is
probably using the bleeding edge stuff that is only available from his
newest code. 

> Should I be using CM and Scheme or CLM and Lisp?  (I'm a little more fluent
> in Lisp but the Meta level book appears to be Scheme).

Well, CM and CLM are different animals in the Lisp Zoo, CM works at the
note level and CLM at the synthesis and processing level level. Actually
both can work on either Scheme or Common Lisp. What I probably should do
is to package both for scheme as well as for Common Lisp to provide a
migration path. CLM, or actually the CLM that is part of Snd comes now
with its own multi-threaded Scheme written from scratch by Bill
(awesome!!!!)

> What is the graphic part of Guile, does it use GL for graphics like fluxus?
> http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/
> (I like fluxus, a scheme environment, but it seems designed to turn sounds
> into graphics and I'm more interested in turning graphic expressions into
> music)

Hope this helps.....
-- Fernando