# Guide to contributing to Csound

**URL:** <https://forum.csound.com/t/guide-to-contributing-to-csound/1852>\
**Category:** Developers\
**Created:** [October 9, 2024, 8:35pm UTC](https://forum.csound.com/t/guide-to-contributing-to-csound/1852 "2024-10-09T20:35:09Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Philipp](https://forum.csound.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/46a35a/32.png) [@Philipp](https://forum.csound.com/u/Philipp)\
**Post date:** [October 9, 2024, 8:35pm UTC](https://forum.csound.com/t/guide-to-contributing-to-csound/1852/1 "2024-10-09T20:35:09Z")

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Hey all!

recently i learned some C coding and i want to start contributing to Csound. Especially with fixing and optimizing some opcodes.

Since i have some problems with figuring out to do this, i was thinking about that it would be nice to have a low level guide to do this. Not only for me, but also for future noobs.  
For example my problem is:

- i searched for the opcode files on my system, but i just found the binary csound file
- on the github project page, on the master branch, i didn’t find the opcode (ctrlpreset) file i want to work on

What do you think of this?

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**Author:** ![rory](https://forum.csound.com/user_avatar/forum.csound.com/rory/32/7_2.png) [@rory](https://forum.csound.com/u/rory)\
**Post date:** [October 10, 2024, 12:39pm UTC](https://forum.csound.com/t/guide-to-contributing-to-csound/1852/2 "2024-10-10T12:39:57Z")

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> [@Philipp](#):
>
> i searched for the opcode files on my system, but i just found the binary csound file

Most opcodes are built into Csound. ctrlpreset is one of Csound’s internal opcodes. I’m not sure how you searching the github repo, but I just typed ctrlpreset into the search bar, and github listed all these files for me:

> **[Build software better, together](https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Acsound%2Fcsound%20ctrlpreset&type=code)**
>
> GitHub is where people build software. More than 150 million people use GitHub to discover, fork, and contribute to over 420 million projects.

If you want to dig around a little you will need to first build Csound. There are build instructions in [csound/BUILD.md at develop · csound/csound · GitHub](https://github.com/csound/csound/blob/develop/BUILD.md)  
Note that it’s probably best to build from the develop branch as this is where csound7 lives.