So, I think this is an important myth to get over...
Well that seems a kinda "biased" approach :)
Whenever anybody says that "Max sounds smoother than Pd" (or viceversa of course) we should force him to answer these three questions:
- define "smoother", what the hell does it mean (is it less
clicks/pops? is it less dropouts? or what else?)
are you comparing with the same hardware?
Let me see the patches (ok this is not a question - this is a demand,
lol)
If he/she cannot provide these data, we should force him/her to apologize for what s/he said - not because it is false but because it doesn't mean anything :)
We could speculate a lot about why a person may think Max sound smoother than Pd and be wrong, or about why Max may actually sound smoother than Pd and "be wrong" (e.g. what-you-get-is-not-just-what-you-did), OR why Max may actually and surprisingly sound smoother than Pd "for a good reason" (do we really know every detail to the last bit of any given sample of a sinusoid?)... But that would be only speculation until we know what we are talking about.
--- On Thu, 3/25/10, Matteo Sisti Sette matteosistisette@gmail.com wrote:
From: Matteo Sisti Sette matteosistisette@gmail.com Subject: Re: [PD] Max Smoother Audio than Pd? To: porres@gmail.com Cc: "PD list" pd-list@iem.at Date: Thursday, March 25, 2010, 6:17 PM
So, I think this is an important
myth to get over...
Well that seems a kinda "biased" approach :)
Whenever anybody says that "Max sounds smoother than Pd" (or viceversa of course) we should force him to answer these three questions:
- define "smoother", what the hell does it mean (is it
less clicks/pops? is it less dropouts? or what else?)
are you comparing with the same hardware?
Let me see the patches (ok this is not a question - this
is a demand, lol)
You don't even need to do 1). You could take examples from both environments (being as careful as possible to make the patches identical and have everyone listen and judge on the same hardware) and do a blind test on which sound is smoother/better/etc. If the results clearly favor sound a over sound b, either there is something to it or something was screwy in one of the patches.
Sounds like someone at cnmat played around with the whole Max vs. Supercollider question a while back (though it was just two people): http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/user/john_maccallum/blog/2008/08/22/max_msp_v_supe...
Somebody in the Max forum mentioned in the blog addressed how the software interface may influence perception of sound quality. I think that's important to keep in mind-- if you're switching back and forth between Max and Pd to compare sounds many other things might be influencing your judgment.
-Jonathan
-
Jonathan Wilkes -
Matteo Sisti Sette