History of the Canonical Csound Reference Manual

Csound is a unit generator-based, user-programmable computer music system. It was originally written by Barry Vercoe at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984 as the first C language version of this type of software. Since then, Csound has received numerous contributions from researchers, programmers and musicians from around the world.

The initial version of this manual for early versions of Csound was started at MIT by Barry L. Vercoe and maintained there during the 1980's and start of the 1990's. Parts of the manual come from documents for programs like Music11 from the 1970's. This original manual was improved and worked on by Richard Boulanger, John ffitch, Jean Piché and Rasmus Ekman.

This manual led to the Official Csound Reference Manual. Version 3.47 is still accessible at Cecilia's Sourceforge repository. Version 4.10, maintained by David M. Boothe, is accessible at MIT archive.

A parallel version of the manual called the Alternative Csound Reference Manual, was developed by Kevin Conder using DocBook/SGML. This version later became the Canonical version.

When Csound was licenced as LGPL by MIT in 2003, the manual was licenced GFDL and placed on Sourceforge along with the sources of Csound.

In the winter of 2004, the Canonical Manual was converted to DocBook/XML by Steven Yi to allow for more people to be able to compile and maintain the manual.

The manual is currently maintained by François Pinot, Menno Knevel, Joachim Heintz and the core developers, with continuous contributions from the Csound Community. The French version of the manual is maintained by François Pinot.

The manual continues to be a community run project that depends on the contributions of developers and users to help refine the coverage and accuracy of its contents. All contributions are welcome and appreciated.

This is a list of past contributions which is by no means complete. More information can be gathered from the Changelog file in the manual's sources repository.

Mike Berry, Richard Boulanger, David M. Booth, Oeyvind Brandtsegg, Eli Breder, Andrés Cabrera, Michael Casey, Michael Clark, Kevin Conder, Perry Cook, Sean Costello, Stefano Cucchi, Richard Dobson, Mark Dolson, Gareth Edwards, Rasmus Ekman, Dan Ellis, Tom Erbe, John ffitch, Bill Gardner, Michael Gogins, Joachim Heintz, Matt Ingalls, Richard Karpen, Menno Knevel, Anthony Kozar, Victor Lazzarini, Allan Lee, David Macintyre, Gabriel Maldonado, Max Mathews, Hans Mikelson, Peter Neubäcker, Peter Nix, Jean Piché, François Pinot, Ville Pulkki, Maurizio Umberto Puxeddu, John Ramsdell, Marc Resibois, Felipe Sateler, Rob Shaw, Paris Smaragdis, Greg Sullivan, Istvan Varga, Bill Verplank, Kevi Welsh, Robin Whittle, Steven Yi