Hi, I've been messing around with making electronic music on the computer for about a year and a half. I started out with project 5, and still use project 5. At first I just used the preset instruments and fooled around for a bit, but I didn't like the cheesey factory settings, which gave everything a out-of-the-box fruityloops feel. Somehow I found out about absynth, and have since put a lot of time into understanding it and learning how to use it to make decent music.

I've grown fairly competent with it, and have a pretty good grasp of how to sculpt the sounds I want with oscillators, envelopes, filters, and lfo's. But I feel somewhat limited, regardless of the fact that I haven't come close to pushing absynth as far as it can go, and I want to open up opportunities for making more complex sounds in different ways. pd seemed the logical choice as it's free, while reaktor isn't.

I'm not a bad mathematician and have a bit of programming experience, so using pd for the basics hasn't been too difficult. I completed most of the tutorial/documentation that was included without too much trouble. I still need to learn a lot more about all the elements I'll need to create to make good synths and whatnot, but pd makes enough sense that I'm pretty sure I'll be able to figure out how to do what I want to do with some study and practice.

My problems are with how to implement pd as a tool to create music. How does one do this? Is it easy to make pd patches into vst's for use with project 5, or say, minihost? If so, how? I don't have any midi controllers and so I want to use pd to create instruments that I can use with the sequencers I'm already familiar with. Or with minihost for when I get a midi controller, so I can quickly switch between a pd patch and other vsts. I understand the basics of programming, but first and foremost I'm just a guy that likes to make music on the computer. Not a programming guru, so I don't really plan on making sequencers or environments, as it seems it would be a lot more difficult than just making synths.

Are there any pd guides out there for people that are predominantly electronic musicians?

I'd appreciate advice from anyone, whether you've been in my shoes or not.

I think this is a cultural question, not a technical one Shankar, and there's a cultural answer. For almost 15 years in "the west" there's been an industry pushing quick and easy solutions to making music. That quick and easy approach is "buy our sample libaries".

I could write you a PhD thesis type essay on why this sucks, why the sample peddlers
have triumphed over the possiblity of human programmable synthesisers, why the cult of emulation and "hip hop" producers sampling loops of other peoples records has brought music down to the lowest common denominator. But I can sum it up in
one... creativity is hard. (And nobody wants to pay for it any longer, or invest
time in cultivating it)

I'm trying, in my own gentle way, to spread a little understanding and fresh enthusiasm for what I think has become a hidden art. Really understanding sound and synthesis is orders of magnitude (if there were such a scale) more difficult than grabbing a breakbeat from a record or going out with a microphone to collect material. Music making with preset tools has become so easy, and producers so lazy, that even the top paid studio producers do little except arrange other peoples work, and many lack even the most basic engineering skills to do recording and preproduction work on live material. Everyone wants to be a musician these days and put their "original" creations up on MySpace, and they can be - with Acid, FruityLoops and Reason you can just audition a few loops, press the "good" button and voila! Except your "original creation" is just a permutation on the same sound everybody else is making. That's why much music is so dreary, predictable and stale these days I think. The mainstream tools have become so rigid that it's impossible to subvert their use, and subversion is the essence of creative art.

Anyway, it would be arrogant to judge other peoples approach to music making this way. I myself spent many years hooked into the cult of sampling and making music
from other peoples work - it just became a boring creative cul-de-sac.

However, I would argue as a professional producer who has seen the industry go though many changes that the easy route to music making with sample libraries, combined with the mainstream medias greed for fast and cheap products has basically killed off a generation of really creative musicians and producers.

I've revised my paraphrasing of Miller about "undoing the sampling revolution".
There never was a sampling revolution. Sampling is the status quo, and the synthetic
revolution is still waiting to happen.

I say, stick with Pd, put in the effort to really understand manipulating and creating sound from first principles and you will harvest the fruits of its power and let your genuine creativity shine through.

Hi pure people,
I am new to pure but an experienced software developer.
I use PD for an interactive audio installation and especially GEM for the actual video processing and movement detection. Allthough it works fine on my development plattform, an old ibook G4, a few differences of the behaviour betweeb Mac and Windows of some GEM objects make me worry.

My development machine (on the go... is an old ibook with tiger (and an ati 9200) and a new pc with xp sp2 and a geforce 7600. The target plattform will likely be a pc also with xp sp2.
The software I use is the pd-extended 0.38-4 release.

My development works as this: I use a movie that is prerecorded and shows movement of a single object (like an elevator moving up and down with stops in between).
My patch is partially build like the GEM documentation example Gem - 04.video - 0.3.movement_detection.pd. Additionally to this I have subpatches that do movement analysis patches for speed and accelleration of a single moving object.

On the mac (with an ATI 9200) the initial view of the prerecorded movie is quite dark and the basic movement detection is very sensible and works quite well (and also the analysis).
On windows (with a geforce 7600) it is different. The movie looks quite normal, with the normal brightness (the mac was very dark), and the movement detection is very insensitive and does not really work.

Things that I recognized and resulting questions:
1. Is there a difference in initial values the GEM objects have if there is no explicit initialisation?

2. The colormodel seems to be different. A color of 1 1 1 is black on the ibook (with the ATI card) and white at the PC (with the geforce)

3. What reason can it have, that the displayed video on the mac (with the given example) is initially way darker than expected.

4. On the mac, the prerecorded movie cycles infinitely with the auto option of pix_film whereas pure on windows stops after one cycle. Is there a reason for this behaviour?

5. Is there actually a difference between the way GEM objects are initialized between Windows and Mac and also between different opengl vendors (like the color model between ati and nvidia).

Hope someone can share some experiences with GEM and how to work around the difficulties of GEM on different plattforms.

Regards,
Michael.

Running pd on the mac has upsides and downsides...

I use both. The PC is handy for running wierd stuff like the VST~ objects, but my mac has better audio support, plus its a laptop so its more handy for gigs etc... An added bonus is my mac doesn't sound like a harrier jump jet, unlike the fan on my PC. However, the PC does keep my feet nice and warm under the desk at this time of year.

Sad to say it, but the mac actually crashes more often than the PC now days, something i never thought i would find myself saying

As for running linux on the mac, you could run a linux build with a nice GUI, however, having tried the mac-linux install myself in the past I wouldn't recomend it unless you really know what your doing and don't mind messing about with various bits of your mac's built in kit (especialy wifi cards) for a few weeks to get the damn things to work...