On 14/02/16 22:27, Matti Viljamaa wrote:
Do you think Pd has a characteristic sound to it? Or whether discussion board threads claiming Pd (and Max) have a distinct (and not good) sound just have people who haven’t listened to good patches?
Some issues with Pd that affect sound character:
- cos~ (and osc~) use a small table with linear interpolation, which
means there is quite a lot of interpolation noise - I wrote about it here: http://mathr.co.uk/blog/2015-04-21_approximating_cosine.html
- vcf~ (and probably other recursive filters) use single precision
floating point in the feedback loop (pd-double might be different) which causes weird rounding artifacts - I wrote about it here: http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2010-08/082104.html
- cubic interpolation (tabread4~ etc) in Pd uses an (imho) incorrect
algorithm - it makes a curve that goes through 4 points instead of matching the derivatives at the nearest 2 points, which leads to sharp corners at the original sample points with associated aliasing artifacts
- this has been discussed on the lists many times in the past, for
example here: http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2008-06/062864.html and: http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2010-03/077278.html
- sig~ (and implicit sig~ from float messages to signal inlets) is
steppy and only takes effect at block boundaries - compare with .kr in SC3 which is (afaik) linearly interpolated between each block boundary
- Pd doesn't print enough digits to perfectly reconstruct floating
point values when round-tripping through files, so (eg) biquad~ coefficients can become imprecise if you don't write them outside Pd in a text editor
- other systems tend to come bundled with more nice-sounding stuff like
bandlimited oscillators etc, with Pd you tend to have to find externals yourself (deken should make that easier now)