can csound patches (or nord modular) be converted to supercollider? – Questions

speaking as someone who has a fair amount of Csound experience, but not really much SuperCollider experience.

is it possible to convert a csound patch into supercollider?

the quick and easy answer to this is “no”, practically speaking. But let’s settle on the “it depends”.

The Csound/Supercollider paradigms are fundamentally different from one another. So you can’t build a csd to scd converter. However, they share certain commonalities.

The Csound orchestra syntax can be used to unambiguously define an audio graph composed of pre-defined opcodes at control rates and audio rates. In theory, if you had equivalent opcodes implemented as Supercollider UGens, you should be able to define an equivalent audio graph using SC syntax. In theory. You’d basically need to parse a Csound instrument, get it’s graph representation, then use that intermediate representation to generate SuperCollider. A tall ask, IMO. And not worth the time.

would it be better to try pch-to-scd instead and skip csound as an intermediary?

I think so, yes. Absolutely.

is there a way for lua to interact with csound files directly?

There are several entry points. Lua programs can generate CSound files. The Lua API can interact with the Csound API. Lua can be used as a score pre-processor. And there are also the Lua Opcodes in Csound.