History
I began development on xm2sco in the beginning of summer 2011. Initially, I was going to write a tracker with a FT2 interface specially designed for Csound use. It didn't take too much time to realize how unrealistic that was going to be with my shit coding skills. All I wanted was to use a familiar tracker interface to input notes. I didn't have to reinvent the wheel and build another ft2 clone from scratch. I came to settle on the conversion program you see today.
Purpose
With all the modern DAWs and powerful synths available these days, it may be puzzling as to what exactly I am doing this for. In a word: Linux. Having been a Linux user for over five years, I've come to realize that audio is a weakspot, and that music is even more so. I find that many DAWs available for the Linux platform are quite unstable and limiting. Linux musicians don't quite have the selection of quality plugins that one can find on the Mac/Windows platforms. Furthermore, many Linux synthesizers are geared for realtime control and not offline rendering.
I have always seen Csound as a possible solution to these problems. It is one of the most sophistacted synthesizers available. It is also free, open source, and available for Linux. With decades of development, it has become very stable software to use. Using Csound as a synthesis engine, one has the potential of creating tracks which rival commercial sounds!
Trackers are an excellent combination with Csound. They too have a long history of development and I have found them to be the most stable music applications on Linux. I also am a big advocate of the tracker interface in general (Renoise ftw!) There is no method of step editing that comes close. To the speed of a tracker.