Software Alternatives & Reviews

Csound VS Overtone

Compare Csound VS Overtone and see what are their differences

Csound logo Csound

The Csound Community

Overtone logo Overtone

Overtone is an open source audio environment designed to explore new musical ideas from synthesis...
  • Csound Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-21

Csound is a sound and music computing system which was originally developed by Barry Vercoe in 1985 at MIT Media Lab. Since the 90s, it has been developed by a group of core developers. A wider community of volunteers contribute examples, documentation, articles, and takes part in the Csound development with bug reports, feature requests and discussions with the core development team.

Although Csound has a strong tradition as a tool for composing electro-acoustic pieces, it is used by composers and musicians for any kind of music that can be made with the help of the computer. Csound has traditionally been used in a non-interactive score driven context, but nowadays it is mostly used in in a real-time context. Csound can run on a host of different platforms including all major operating systems as well as Android and iOS. Csound can also be called through other programming languages such as Python, Lua, C/C++, Java, etc.

One of the main principles in Csound development is to guarantee backwards compatibility. You can still render a Csound source file from 1986 on the latest Csound release, and you should be able to render a file written today with the latest Csound in 2036.

  • Overtone Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-12-28

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Overtone videos

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Csound and Overtone)
Music Generation
37 37%
63% 63
3D
36 36%
64% 64
Music Tools
40 40%
60% 60
Email Marketing
50 50%
50% 50

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Overtone seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 6 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Csound mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Csound yet. Tracking of Csound recommendations started around Mar 2021.

Overtone mentions (6)

  • Music Programming for Java and JVM Languages
    You might want to look at Overtone, which is a clojure environment built on top of overtone, and which integrates with processing and a few other similar things. https://overtone.github.io/. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • Sonic Pi – The Live Coding Music Synth for Everyone
    > I'm fluent in Python but find the use of colons is the real sticking point. The you'd probably have hated its predecessor which was all about the parentheses: https://overtone.github.io/ It's too bad that superficial stuff like which characters you need to type is holding you back. Getting used to Ruby when you're familiar with Python is no big deal. I would just stick with it. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Can I create an application to help me work out my drums rudiments in emacs
    There's a project you may find interesting: https://overtone.github.io/. Besides sound/synthesis stuff, it has https://github.com/overtone/midi-clj library, which allows you to write MIDI as lisp (Clojure, to be precise) code. Emacs has great support for Clojure programming (via Cider), and REPL-based development is perfect for writing music. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Racket for Computer Music?
    Overtone, in clojure and using the SuperCollider engine. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Code reacting to sound LIVE
    Https://overtone.github.io/ (this project integrates with Processing for visualization). Source: about 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Csound and Overtone, you can also consider the following products

SuperCollider - A real time audio synthesis engine, and an object-oriented programming language specialised for...

Sonic Pi - Sonic Pi is a new kind of instrument for a new generation of musicians. It is simple to learn, powerful enough for live performances and free to download.

Pure Data - Pd (aka Pure Data) is a real-time graphical programming environment for audio, video, and graphical...

ChucK - A strongly-timed music programming language

Klangmeister - Klangmeister is an open-source, live coding environment for composing music in your browser.

Synthesine - Live coding environment for experimenting with sound synthesis in the browser.