On 11 Sep 2010, at 12:00, Juan Manuel Jones wrote:

"I like the free-software nature of PD, but besides that, I want to know the pros and cons of the two environments. Max is "prettier" and with more GUI, but is really more easy to learn? Im not interested in video, only music and sound. What about resources (patches, objets, etc)?"

i think both Max/MSP and Pd are similar in terms of how much you have to bend your brain to understand the dataflow paradigm. in other words, they're essentially the same system, just with different clothes. the Max GUI is much better than the Pd GUI, from the perspective of usability and polish (not surprising since as a commercial company Cycling74 can afford to employ people to work on the GUI full time i guess).

that aside, if you want to get into the guts of things, I'd go with Pd. the community is very helpful. also the tutorials that come with Pd are superb, if you're patient enough to go through them all a couple of times (i'm talking about Help->Browser->2.control.examples and 3.audio.examples).

agree with you that the manual is a bit heavy.

i haven't used Max extensively but coming from Pd i find it frustrating sometimes -- it seems to be less consistent that Pd, seems to crash in more random places, and it seems like it's more work to make modular re-usable systems with it.

hth d -- damian stewart . @damiannz . damian@frey.co.nz frey . contemporary art . http://www.frey.co.nz