For the beginning don't care about externals, as you probably won't need them. When teaching Pd I always tell my students to use Millers version, because as soon as they realize that there might be an external that solves their problem, they go crazy and search for externals and try to compile them instead of thinking about how to solve their problem .. and fail to learn Pd and to get anything going.
thats a really good point!!!! But to be honest i'm a little scared i'm not going to have the patients (or brains) it'll take to make the sort of things i want. Basically i want a some sort of midi patches where i can turn knobs and restructure rhythms in realtime. Sort of like the buffer override (but affecting midi instead of audio), and more coherent . I'm know people have created these things, but like you said it's just not the same as figuring it out yourself. One i'm thinking of in particular is the "glitch" vst plugin. But it's sorta lame to just use a plugin built by someone else, although it does sound tight .. i won't use it besides it's not for os x anyway. So thats my main goal for the moment. Since you teach pd, and have seen lots of different types of people use pd... what is the learning curve for someone of average intelligence. Is it the kind of thing where like one day it'll click and i'll be able to do any sort of thing i can think of. Because at the moment i have to go over tutorials 3 times before i really grasp what tha hell is actually going on. Even then i don't feel like i could create anything from what i've learned... but then again i'm only 1/2 through the control samples so it's a little to soon to tell if i really can "get it". Do you have text book for you're class? Or a syllabus i could look at? Anyway.... thanks for the advice!!!
matt