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  • 2 min read

v7.2: New Widgets

CsoundQt 7.2 brings a set of long-requested widget features: a brand new waveform widget, a scope that can display any Csound audio signal, and flat, fully themeable buttons. (Animating widgets from Csound with outvalue will be the subject of a separate post.)

Waveform widget

The new waveform widget draws the samples of a Csound f-table directly in the widget panel, so you can see exactly what a table (or a soundfile loaded into one) looks like while you work, zoom, pan, set a playback cursor, etc.

  • The f-table number is sent to the widget's channel; a second, string channel carries the cursor position (readable and writable from the orchestra).
  • Multichannel tables are drawn as one lane per channel, sharing a common time axis.
  • The mouse wheel zooms, Shift+wheel scrolls, and Ctrl+drag pans. The view follows the cursor when it moves out of sight.
  • The table is copied before the Csound instance is destroyed, so the waveform stays visible after the performance stops.
  • Try it with the updated example C Widgets/Waveform_Widget.csd.

Scope: monitor any audio channel

Until now a scope could only show what Csound sends to its audio outputs. The scope now has a second channel that names a Csound audio channel, making it easy to probe any signal, even if this signal is not sent to csound's outputs

instr 1
  asig oscils 0.8, 220, 0
  chnset asig, "scopechan"   ; publish the signal on an audio channel
endin

Set the scope's Audio Channel to scopechan and it will display that signal. All the usual scope options — zoom, trigger and display type — apply to monitored channels as well.

Scope widget monitoring a named audio channel

Flat buttons

Buttons can now opt into a flat style that is drawn by CsoundQt itself instead of the native platform widget. The result looks identical on every platform and is fully configurable: background colour, pressed background, text and pressed-text colours, border colour, border width and corner radius. Pushed colours default to the normal colours when left unset.

Enable Flat in a button's properties to try it — the updated C Widgets/Button_Widget.csd example now includes flat and flat-latched buttons.

Getting CsoundQt 7.2

Download the latest binaries from the releases page (AppImage, Flatpak, macOS .dmg and the Windows installer). The complete changelog is in the v7.2.0 release notes.

  • 2 min read

v7.2: Animating Widgets from Csound

Widgets are not only a way for Csound to receive input — they can also be driven and animated from the orchestra. Any widget property can be changed at runtime with a property message:

outvalue "<channel>/<property>", <value>

A property message never changes a widget's value, so you can move, resize, recolour or relabel a widget while it keeps controlling its Csound channel.

How it works

Send messages at a display rate (for example from a metro(30) block, as in the example) rather than every k-cycle. Both numbers and strings are supported:

; colour: a hex string
Scol = sprintfk("#%02x%02x%02x", 127+120*sin(kt*0.8), 90, 200)
outvalue "cutoff/color", Scol

; position: integers
outvalue "mover/x", int(kx)
outvalue "mover/y", int(ky)

; size, visibility, text ...
outvalue "meter/width", 240
outvalue "pulse/visible", (int(kt*1.5) % 2)
outvalue "pulse/text", sprintfk("t = %4.1f s", kt)

The channel name is the widget's channel (the one it already uses to talk to Csound)

Discovering the properties

Every widget's Properties dialog has a Show Properties button which lists all the properties that can be addressed, with a filter box for long lists:

A widget's Properties dialog with the Show Properties list, showing the property names that can be set from Csound

Example

The example C Widgets/Widget_Animation.csd animates colours, position, width, visibility and text from instrument 99, on top of a small synth whose amp slider and cutoff knob still work normally. Open it from the Examples → CsoundQt → C Widgets menu.

See the source: https://github.com/CsoundQt/CsoundQt/blob/csoundqt7/src/Examples/CsoundQt/C%20Widgets/Widget_Animation.csd

Getting CsoundQt 7.2

Download the latest binaries from the releases page (AppImage, Flatpak, macOS .dmg and the Windows installer). The complete changelog is in the v7.2.0 release notes.