A modern visual environment for Csound 7 on Windows — write orchestras with a smart editor, hear and see them in real time, play them with MIDI, sequence them with a piano roll and a step sequencer, run your VST3 plug-ins after Csound, and send the same code into Cubase as a VST3 plug-in.
Made 100% with vibe coding. Every line of code, every test and every page of documentation of Csound Visual was written by an AI (Claude Code, by Anthropic) through natural-language conversation. Its author directed the project, tried it and decided what to build, but did not write the code by hand.
▶ Watch the 1-minute demo on YouTube (narration: synthetic voice)
- Editor that understands Csound — syntax colours, autocompletion of the 1,400+ opcodes, help on hover (F1), every occurrence of the selected word highlighted, errors marked on their line.
- Live coding — Ctrl+Enter recompiles the instrument under the cursor while it plays; channel
sliders appear automatically for every
chnget/chnk; drag a number in the code to change it. - Live values and breakpoints — see variables while the sound plays, watch them in a panel, or stop on a line (F9) and step through k-cycles (F10) with all local variables shown.
- Own low-latency audio engine — WASAPI shared or exclusive (≈3 ms measured), live audio input with clock-drift correction, DSP-load and RAM meters, recording to WAV.
- MIDI 1.0 and MIDI 2.0 (Windows MIDI Services), MIDI learn on any slider, on-screen keyboard.
- Music tools — piano roll (draw, record MIDI, insert into the score) and a step sequencer with swing, probability, Euclidean fills and a synthesised drum kit; both scheduled on Csound's own clock.
- Paint Rooms — compose and design sound by painting: time × pitch canvas, harmonics brush, Scala tunings and imported pictures, played live by Csound or rendered to WAV (Ctrl+Shift+I). An Image Sequencer turns painted patterns into phrases and loops; 16-bit and RGBA pictures paint noise per pixel (blue) and masks (alpha).
- VST3 host — put your VST3 effects and instruments after Csound, open their own windows, save the chain; a plug-in manager switches off plug-ins that crash, like Cubase does.
- Csound inside your DAW — a VST3 instrument/effect plug-in that runs any orchestra; Send to DAW sends the code from the editor to Cubase and keeps the app's sliders linked to it.
- Cabbage compatibility —
<Cabbage>sections are drawn as knobs, sliders, XY pads, buttons and keyboards. - Ableton Link — share tempo and phase with Live, Bitwig and phone apps.
- 3D views on the GPU — waterfall spectrogram, XYZ pad, binaural spatial panner.
- 1,500+ examples — the whole Csound manual plus galleries of showcase pieces, audio processing (time-stretch, spectral freeze, vocoder, convolution, granular…) and Cabbage instruments.
- English and Spanish interface and documentation, five colour themes.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
- Download
CsoundVisual-<version>-win-x64.zipfrom the Releases page. - Unzip it anywhere and run
CsoundVisual.exe. Nothing else to install: the package carries the .NET runtime and Csound 7. - Press Play (F5). Open Examples (Ctrl+E) to explore.
The program is not code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen may show "Windows protected your PC" the first time: click More info › Run anyway.
Requirements: Windows 11 x64, version 24H2 or later; a GPU with Direct3D 11 for the 3D views. MIDI 2.0 devices need Windows MIDI Services (MIDI 1.0 works without it).
To use Csound inside Cubase, copy the VST3 plug-in\CsoundVisual.vst3 folder from the package to
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Common\VST3 and rescan plug-ins.
| English | Español | |
|---|---|---|
| User guide | user-guide | guía de usuario |
| Editor, live values, breakpoints | editor-intelligence | inteligencia-del-editor |
| Audio engine | audio-engine | motor-de-audio |
| MIDI | midi | midi |
| Piano roll and step sequencer | music-tools | herramientas-musicales |
| Paint Rooms (painting sound, spectral editing, image filter) | paint-rooms | salas-de-pintura |
| VST3 host | vst3-host | host-vst3 |
| Csound inside Cubase | vst3-cubase | vst3-cubase |
| Cabbage | cabbage | cabbage |
| Ableton Link | ableton-link | ableton-link |
| 3D views | visual-3d | visual-3d |
| Architecture | architecture | arquitectura |
| Roadmap | roadmap | hoja de ruta |
The same pages are in HTML in docs/html (and in the Docs folder of the release).
See BUILDING.md: .NET 10 SDK, a Csound 7 installation, and — for the optional native parts (VST3 host, VST3 plug-in, Ableton Link) — Visual Studio 2022 with C++ and CMake.
Csound Visual is a young project (version 0.1). It has been developed and tested on one Windows 11 PC with a Steinberg UR22mkII, an Impact LX61+ keyboard and Cubase 15. Bug reports and ideas are welcome in the Issues.
Csound Visual is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 or (at your option) any later version — see LICENSE.
It builds on Csound (LGPL-2.1), Avalonia, the Steinberg VST 3 SDK (MIT), Ableton Link (GPL-2.0+) and other open-source components; the examples from the Csound manual are under the GFDL-1.2+. Details and trademarks: THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.
VST is a registered trademark of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH. Csound Visual is an independent project, not affiliated with the Csound developers, Steinberg, Ableton or Cabbage.