Computer music playpen, again

[gogins]

I'm resurrecting this project, based on the following observations:

• The earlier Python based playpen did not go anywhere.
• The cloud-5 project is actually quite useful, but does not provide access to filesystems.
• The csound-node project based on NW.js does provide access to filesystems and has been quite useful, but I hate the need for a fiddly startup script and the lack of an editor, and that NW.js is a niche application.
• The Csound for Android app works well but is flawed by new filesystem permissions (or lack thereof).
• CsoundQt never worked well enough for me.
• I could never get colors adequately configured in SciTE which, otherwise worked very well and was simple, too.

HTML5 pieces must, as far as possible, make identical calls to the Csound API. I am making another attempt to use Visual Studio Code. It should be possible to reuse playpen.ini and playpen.py.

[gogins]

Not familiar with running Python pieces in Visual Studio Code, but I'm sure it will work with some additional configuration. It assumes a virtual Python environment is being used, I don't know for sure how to install packages in such.

Not that hard. In the home directory:

sudo cp /System/Volumes/Data/opt/homebrew/Cellar/csound/6.18.1_4/lib/python3.12/site-packages/ctcsound.py .venv/lib/python3.12/site-packages
source .venv/bin/activate  
python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip
python3 -m pip --version
python3 -m pip install numpy

Python with ctcsound works now from Visual Studio Code.

[gogins]

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41022725/launch-and-attach-to-nw-js-program-from-visual-studio-code https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42017617/how-to-install-vs-code-extension-manually https://code.visualstudio.com/api/references/contribution-points

Apparently, it is not possible to add a new menu or menu item, except in context menus. That should be good enough, however.

[gogins]

Menu Design

Csound files

• [x] Render .csd to audio
• [x] Render .csd to soundfile, not doing, redundant with the following
• [x] Render .csd to soundfile, post-process, edit soundfile
• [x] Render .inc to soundfile, play from editor

Html files

• [x] Build Web site, not doing, redundant with more sophisticated NPM view in VS Code
• [x] Serve Web site, not doing, redundant with more sophisticated NPM view in VS Code
• [x] Open .html from Web site in browser
• [x] Open .html in NW.js

C++ files

• [x] Compile .cpp to plugin opcode
• [x] Compile .cpp to program linked with Csound and CsoundAC, run it
• [x] Compile .cpp to CsoundAC program linked with Csound and CsoundAC, render audio
• [x] Compile .cpp to CsoundAC program linked with Csound and CsoundAC, render soundfile, post-process, edit soundfile

Reference

• [x] HTML5 reference
• [x] Csound reference
• [x] Csound API reference
• [ ] CsoundAC reference, need to build reference and deploy to gogins.github.io.
• [x] Csound FLOSS manual
• [x] C++ reference
• [x] Python reference
• [x] Reformat code, not doing, redundant with extensions in VS Code

[gogins]

Customizing VS Code is not intuitive. I would however prefer something that a user can simply install and that does not involve doing excessive configurationl.

[gogins]

I got the reference documentation working.

I got the "Render .csd as audio" command working.

[gogins]

Find out how to:

• [x] Abort running command/piece/build. This is very difficult because I'm repurposing playpen.py, so first Visual Studio Code spawns a subprocess to run python3 playpen.py, and then playpen.py spawns another subprocess to run the actual command. But I solved this simply by creating a new Terminal with a backing shell, and sending the command to the shell. The user can then manually kill the Terminal.
• [x] Assign command to menu. Only the editor context menu seems to actually work; other menus work once and go away.
• [x] Document this extension.
• [x] Package this extension.
• [x] Publish this extension? Not at this time because of degree of Python/configuration.

[gogins]

No doubt there will be bugs and changes, but I'm going to let that happen in the course of use.