> My current favorite is OpusModus https://www.opusmodus.com. It is a commercial app, which will dissapoint some, but is worth the price to me for the level of quality and capabilities.

Personally I love seeing this kind of niche (I assume?) commercial software. It's great that people can make a living working on this kind of thing.

I hope they are managing to make a living. I have created music software over the decades, going from making a good living during the shrinkwrap software era, to not being able to support full-time development of a mobile music app. I am impressed that Finale, Sibelius and Dorico can find enough market share to fund development and be competitive.

For a musical Lisp, personally I prefer extempore: https://github.com/digego/extempore

Extempore is impressive for sure. They wrote a custom scheme interpreter and a REPL for VSCode. More info here: https://extemporelang.github.io/docs/overview/quickstart/

Hate to sound like a broken record here, but can opus modus handle its own sound synthesis or is it purely compositional?

Not that theres anything wrong with that, but if $400 is the price for ending my suffering, I'll pay out in a heartbeat ;)

I focus on the compositional aspects of the program, but I do like to be able to audition what I am making! I can use software and hardware synthesizers to do this, but it sounds like you want something with more fundamental building blocks. OpusModus is able to integrate with Common Lisp Music (CLM) https://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/snd/snd/clm.html. Info on integration with OpusModus here: https://opusmodus.com/forums/tutorials/clm-examples/clm-inst... CLM will give you osciallators, generators, filters and more. I am not a CLM expert, but it seems to address some of what you are looking for.

Yeh that seems to be what I'm looking for, will look into this more, cheers!