--- On Fri, 3/19/10, Frank Barknecht fbar@footils.org wrote:
From: Frank Barknecht fbar@footils.org Subject: Re: [PD] Pd, Max/Msp, Reaktor, Plogue Bidule... How do these, compare? To: pd-list@iem.at Date: Friday, March 19, 2010, 7:08 PM Hallo, Pierre Massat hat gesagt: // Pierre Massat wrote:
Another thing that'd be nice to make available for new
users would be a
comprehensive set of generic patches, which would
cover the whole range of
DSP audio. A little bit like Puckette's audio help
patches, only on a higher
level (stuff like a basic drum machine, a
comprehensive synth, granular
synthesis, etc). I know that these aren't impossible
to find, but it'd be
nice to have it all in the same place.
The "rj" library developed for the creation of RjDj scenes, but also usable outside, tries exactly that. It is all abstractions, all run on Pd vanilla, no externals, not complicated -path setup needed, it has IMO pretty good help files (I wrote most, so I have to say this) and it provides a lot of everyday musician's tools plus some analysis and composition helpers.
It's deliberatly minimal, so that it doesn't overwhelm a newbie user with hundreds of objects. It's philosophy is "often-needed batteries included". For example, from [list]-abs it has a "listmap", "listdrip", "listreduce", "listfilter", "listrandom" and "listnth", but not the other 50 or so list objects. The included objects will solve about 80% of your everyday list-use, for the rest, you can still resort to the full [list]-abs objects. Similar approaches have been taken for other areas.
So far it has proven to be a successful base for many interesting music pieces written in Pd for RjDj. Check out trac.rjdj.me for details.
Ciao
Frank
I'd just add that one could start from the end of 3.audio.examples and 4.data.structures to get a decent overall idea of what Pd is capable of doing.
The only problem with this currently is that those patches are quite understandably not the most beginner-friendly ones-- something like doc/4.data.structures/14.partialtracer.pd probably looks fairly intimidating to a beginner. But if it were organized a little and given some friendly controls (plus maybe a feature to write the re-edited tracks to a .wav file) there's no reason a beginner couldn't start there and other places to get some pretty interesting sounds out of the computer.
-Jonathan