there are a lot of csound freaks out there... hiding in caves and whatnot. I have written 1 'classical' piece in csound, but it was a very simple piece. It can be a pain, but once you get the hang of it it is very useful because it allows you to create your own sounds from scratch. It is also a very versatile, deep program.

Generally for EDM purposes, csound is useful for creating and editing samples that you can then plug into Cubase/Protools for EDM production. It is a real pain in the ass to write an entire EDM track in csound, though some people have done it, no doubt.

Also, it is possible to change old computers into interesting synths. Just design a csound synth and treat it like you would any synthesizer. It's fully midi capable if you have the hardware - even standard midi controllers.

As for using Csound to score...now that's just twisted.

I think the only people that do that seriously are people that are into algorithmic composition. And that's just a novelty. I've never heard anything interesting that was scored in csound personally.

If people like Bluetech can make such sick ass music with Reaktor, why not Csound if someone with the right amount of talent and techiness was familiar with it? Despite what some may think Csound is often at a higher level of abstraction than Reaktor (even though Csound has more functions. The only difference is that you program one in ASCII, which makes it awkward for somethings, but is actually more natural for somethings - ever tried to do a delay loop (echo) in Reaktor?

Getting setup for real-time play and visual feedback is the only major obstacle (one I still havn't figured out completely) but it seems that once you have that down it might be better than Reaktor atleast (and like I said, I KNOW people make great music with that)