...

I sympathize - what about the fftease package? I don't know anything about it but it may have something like you described if I remember correctly. I was really screwed on understanding FFT until I looked at the VASP examples and then it made a little sense. The wonderful thing about Pd is that you still don't always need to understand the math, just playing with trial and error works too! Which would have been fine for me except my patch sounded like poo, hence the post.

FFTease for Pd is available here:

http://www.sarc.qub.ac.uk/~elyon/LyonSoftware/MaxMSP/FFTease/

It was very much written as an "FFT for Dummies" package, or more precisely to expose the possibilities of spectral processing while hiding much of the coding pain. Open-sourcing FFTease is on my todo list; for now it is available as binaries for Mac(ppc)/Win/Linux. The documentation should get you started, but feel free to write me directly if you have any questions.

Best,

Eric