Graphical display of CM note params?

[Rick Taube]

>I have in mind something like a crude piano roll notation, or possibly a
>better system  where a number of variables can be displayed at once,

i think tobias kunze started something like your second choice on the mac
but gave up on it once he got his sgi. it showed 5 "dimensions" of data,
using x,y,z,color and intensity. his old code assumed midi but of couse
such an editor could be made totally generic.

cm has a gui for its macintosh port including a thread/event editor, an
envelope editor, and (in the next release) a network editor a la max and an
html help facility. the basic problem with interface code that it is not
part of the common lisp standard so it is not portable. however, if gnuplot
is good enough for your purposes, then dumping cm data to such a formatted
file is very easy to do -- that is one of the things the system is designed
for and you could probably implement such an interface in about an hour's
time by defining it as a cm syntax as i did for cmn, csound, clm ... look
at any of the easy syntax implementation files like csound.lisp or
rtmix.lisp or cmn.lisp.  But this solution wont allow you to use a gui to
effect changes in data, for that you really need a windowing system inside
lisp. i am investigating CLX in ACL/Linux, if i can use it that might be a
good solution for all unix ports since clx runs in most lisps. another
solution might be to use the future ACL 5.0 release that will provide an
identical lisp/gui api across all platforms (if i understand the rumors
correctly) but of course that would force you to purchase their lisp.