You can open up an existing orc/sco pair. The documents will be placed in a temporary module and saved as Csound documents when you save. Do Open under File... and select the orchestra you wish to use. The score sharing the same prefix as the orchestra will automatically open as well. When you save in the editor, your orc/sco pair will be returned to two separate text documents. You can save to a single Cecilia module document by choosing Save as...
For new documents, choose Module under the New cascade in the File menu. The editor opens up. Write in a mono, stereo or quad orchestra. Use the Button-3 opcode-insert feature that lets you paste preformatted opcodes from the manual. Do *not* specify headers in your orchestra(s). In order to use your new module, you must have defined a legal orchestra and you must have saved your module and given it a name. Computations cannot proceed on an untitled document. Specify an sr, ksmps and number of channels in the main window. The number of channels must match the number of channels implicit in the editor "pane" you chose to program your orchestra. Specify a soundfile name to write if you choose to write to disk. Hit Preview or Write in the main window or do the hot-keys in any window. Preview goes to DACs, Write goes to disk.
If you wish to save your new orc/sco pair as separate Csound documents, you can choose Export as Csound under the File menu of the editor.
Note: Any comments before the orchestra header will be discarded by Cecilia when you save as Csound documents.
The two Csound temp files used for actual computations are always computed from the current contents of the editor. Hence, after you have initially saved the document(s), changes do not need to be saved before computation.
The number of channels in the computation is determined by the "channels" variable in the Main window. Hence the editor offers three different window panes to edit mono, stereo or quad versions of the same module. The "channels" will instruct CECILIA on which of these versions to take. This can lead to confusion when a stereo soundin is used in a mono setting or if there is a conflict with the sampling rate of an input sound versus the chosen sampling rate of the output. It is up to the user to ensure channel and sr compatibilities.
Choose one of the modules in the New cascade in the File menu. Choose an input sound if a soundIn selector appears. Muck around with the graphs and other objects. Compiling works as above.
Start with the two steps above to familiarize yourself with CECILIA. Choose one of the BuiltIn modules in the cascade in the File menu. Choose Show source editor under the Windows menu. Open the tk_interface editor pane by selecting it in the Sections menu of the editor. See how it is done. Pay attention to how the variables are declared and substituted in the orchestra and/or the score. Quite simple, really.
In order to use your module, you must have defined a legal orchestra and you must have saved your module and given it a name. Computations cannot proceed on an untitled document.
When you change something in the tk_interface, you must save and reinit your module for the changes to show up.
The info editor panel lets you document your module. Anything entered here will appear in the "About this module" dialog in the interface help menu and when "info" is pressed in the main window.
Once you have built and tested your module, you can have it appear under the New cascade in the File menu by specifying a directory in the Preferences dialog. Any directory entered in one of the four entries will be parsed at startup time and its contents will appear in the New cascade.