Hey HC and the gang,
Adam Hyde has been working on a PDF/HTML manual for getting PD up and running. I've talked with him a bit about how beneficial such a thing is versus a set of patches like the ones which have been contributed here. But you might want to have a look at it:
http://www.flossmanuals.net/edit
I may be meeting with him soon about where it could go, and I'm sure he's open for other suggestions as well.
Mark Polishook wrote:
Two comments: 1. the patches are very good at identifying core concepts and explaining them. 2. But the hard thing about tutorial writing is it's difficult to show how those small concepts relate to larger artistic concerns.
I agree on both fronts. The main issue with PD is that people use it for so many different things that demonstrating "artistic concerns" would be pretty limited to what the author happens to be doing with PD. All the same, I do find that there is a serious lack of "demo" patches, or something like a "user library" that noobs could have a look at for inspiration. Simple and not so simple but usable tools, along the same lines as the User Library in Reaktor, or maybe even the Pluggo patches from Cycling74 (except you can't open those up, can you???). I tried to make something like that with ParticleChamber, and I know that other stuff has come up on the list when people ask about synth collections and the like. Might be good to try to collect these kinds of abstractions together into a library of sorts (a la RRRAD).
best, derek