Csound and x86_64 machines

I could not understand why Sugar TamTam activities wouldn't play any sound on x86_64 even though the problem seemed resolved! It took a while to realize that the problem was with x86_64 architecture. I could get the sound to play on an i686 virtual machine.

Thanks to realtime Csound programming using Python, I could trace the fault. The issue is illustrated by the following code in csoundSession.py:

        if csnd.csoundGetSizeOfMYFLT() == 8:
            pfields = csnd.doubleArray(n)
        else:
            pfields = csnd.floatArray(n)

The csound client code in Python and C used by tamtam activities assumes a float array.

The following line in csound.spec from rpm source makes the issue pretty clear:

# Csound is really dumb about 64-bit

Rebuilding csound on x86_64 with "%define useDouble 0" even for x86_64 resolved the problem with TamTam activities.

However, it is entirely possible that this workaround may cause some other applications which use csound to fail on x86_64.

Running TamTam Activities on Fedora 20

While preparing an old machine to give to the children of our helper, I had to struggle a bit to get TamTam activities to run. I was using the Sugar environment on Fedora 20. The version of TamTam activities in the Fedora repository was old and did not work.

The solutions were as follows:

• The tamtamorc.cfd file in tamtam/common/Resources/ needs an additional comma in line 62:
  
  $ diff tamtamorc.csd tamtamorc.csd.orig
  62c62
  < aindex, atrans, ifreq, iphase, itable, itabdur xin
  ---
  > aindex, atrans, ifreq, iphase itable, itabdur xin
  
• On the x86_64 systems, in common/Util/Clooper, I needed to run make to make sure that aclient.so is built for the installed version of csound.