CsoundForLive is a software development project by Boulanger Labs that began as Colman O’Reilly’s senior portfolio project at Berklee College of Music in 2011. Alongside other members of a small dev team including Matt Hines (later of iZotope), I contributed to various aspects of the product’s development leading up to its launch, including UI design, demo music composition, QA testing and other miscellaneous consultation.

The objective of CsoundForLive is essentially to distill the complexity of the Csound runtime environment - a very powerful legacy sound design and music composition coding environment whose aesthetics and operational principles hearken all the way back to assembly-like instructions to be compiled on mainframes - into the simplicity of a modern software plug-in that runs in a contemporary DAW. This is accomplished through the bridging of encapsulated Csound instances into Max for Live devices with VST-like interfaces, so that they can easily be used within Ableton Live.