also, in my opinion Pd is weak as a typical artist's tool to make music.

In my opinion as, what I guess would be a typical artist, it is the

most powerful tool I have ever used. I think people just need to change their 'typical artist' mindset. If you go into it thinking you are going to get LIVE or Cubase you will be very disappointed. If you go in thinking you get a blank canvas to literally do whatever you want, you will be freaked out and happy, and maybe a bit overwhelmed at first.

i know it's a lot of work but might be easier for somebody who's written such a program that's open-source... to learn a bit about Pd's framework and port/modify their existing stuff.

The main problem is basically your first sentence. It's a lot of

work. I have been doing more experiments lately with the data structures that sort of mimic some of the functionality I want to bring over from other programs. Using Krzysztof Czaja's Toys you can even start to build GUI stuff (if that is what you want to do, I'm leaning towards using as much of the base PD stuff as possible). Any way you approach the problem it's a big long development time. For what in the end? A copy of logic? Premiere? I would rather experiment and find a new working style. And if you really wanted to have something that was Cubase or Nuendo, why not just buy that? It is out there and it will most likely have a lot less bugs than anything I would write in PD that tried to emulate it. The main reason I'm doing this stuff is to really learn about everything PD has to offer, I give myself a problem like, if I want and arrange window like Logic in PD what would I have to do to get it, and I gradually build something that isn't quite the arrange window, but is pretty interesting and does some cool stuff, plus I learn a ton more about PD in the process.

m.