athenaCL and blue

Nobody can ever claim there aren’t enough options out there to try.

I had run across this one before, and still haven’t had time to research it any more closely. From its website, it’s described this way:

“athenaCL is a modular, polyphonic, poly-paradigm algorithmic music composition in a cross-platform interactive command-line environment.”

It’s another open-source project (i.e., free to try). It requires Csound and Python to be installed, but those are in their turn free downloads as well. There is a wealth of detail on it at the athenaCL website.

Another quite mature and powerful Csound-based tool is Steven Yi’s blue system. His description is this:

blue is a java program for use with Csound. Its interface is much like a digital multitrack, but differs in that there timelines within timelines (polyObjects). This allows for a compositional organization in time that seems to me to be very intuitive, informative, and flexible.

Yes, you do need to have Java installed on your PC; but that is free as well.

I haven’t seen such a resource, but I think a big chart showing all these tools, with their basic descriptions, pros and cons, and prerequisites (i.e, Java, Python, etc.) would be a great help to newcomers–particularly if they don’t have the time to explore each option on their own.