I keep writing about free modular music applications, and I’m sure nobody cares. But here goes anyway.

I just found out abot CPS that used to cost $150 but was just released for free a few days ago.

CPS is a realtime interactive programming environment for audio, MIDI and other media & I/O. Patches are build by placing objects and making wires between them. Areas of interest are sound design, algorithmic composition, DSP, electronic/computer music and education. CPS can be used in any realtime situation where sound plays a role.

Build-in objects allow you low-level access to audio MIDI and other I/O, and any processing in between. Objects include audio and MIDI (hardware&file) I/O, fourier analyse, filters, noise generators, envelopes, delays, lfo’s, effects, and much more objects like tables which you can fill with ‘generators’ (a feature which derives directly from Csound), several network options, joystick, serialport, video processing units (through Quicktime) for layered playback of video & images, VST hosting of VST plugins/instruments, MP3 decoding, and all MPEG-4 Structured Audio opcodes (which are on their turn based on Csound). The best of as well graphic and text editing comes together inside CPS.

Now this sounds just like MAX/MSP and Reaktor that we all know, love and use daily, right!? The main difference is this is free, and has one huge advantage, namely you can make stand alone programs and plug-ins of your patches. Not only VST but also use them in Macromedia and Java environments. Yes, you can make VST plug-ins with MAX/MSP but to be able to use them you need Pluggo, which is a major flaw.

Can I make a stand-alone program of a patch?
Yes, you can. You do not have the graphical interface of CPS within your program, but the ‘engine’ of CPS runs stand alone. You can use the engine inside a C++ or Java program or in MacroMedia Director/Shockwave. Use one of these three to make a graphical interface for your program. To get you started, you can save a patch as C++ or Java or Lingo (for MacroMedia Director) code.

There is also a usefull object (called ‘application’) to test a CPS patch inside your application, so that the graphical interface of CPS is still available. See the documentation of the ‘application’ object for more information.

While my C++ skills aren’t what they should or used to be (in all honesty they’ve never been great) this feels like a good time to pick them up again. I will give it a try at least, and if I succeed I will publish my results here.