On Thursday 08 April 2004 20:26, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:

You could try the PDB: http://pd.iem.at/pdb

.hc

I think _try_ is the important modifier here. I've found that the PDB in its current state, is largely useless, as not all the available PD externals are in there. Or maybe they are, and something is wrong with it's search engine.

I don't remember and have not logged, all my past searches, but I do remember that a lot of stuff just isn't in there, and/or the search function doesn't work very well. For example, a search on "sustain" on the PDB turns up nothing, although I've since learned that there is indeed a "sustain" object in the Cyclone package.

Hopefully, there can be in the future, a more direct way of doing things, although I realize that it's not so easy to decide on, and to implement, such a scheme, that will work on all OS's. . However, it seems clear that a voluntary database, where the author needs to enter his wares, apparently doesn't work too well. About half the time I've used it, I've found that my search failed not because the external didn't exist, but rather because nobody entered it in to this database.

I'm not accusing anyone here - indeed, I'm just as guilty as the next guy, because I probably still have my obsolete pd-scheme external listed which I should probably go and delete. Then again, I think that having obsolete things still in the database isn't as much of a problem as _not_ having current, functional, externals, as which seems to be quite the case.

Of course, there's probably no simple solution to this problem, and we (the PD users) should probably just feel lucky that there's so many externals available, even if they're not all entered in to that database.

But still, I wonder if in the long run, it would be best if we just killed this PDB idea. The question to be asked, is does it cause people on the average, to waste more time, than if the database weren't there to begin with. A dificult question, obviously, to be sure.

Larry

Larry