@lacuna said:

Who hears clicks when switching at zero-crossings?

It's always been absolute nonsense that it's safe to edit at zero crossings -- as you demonstrated

I think: to avoid clicks, not only the signal itself should avoid discontinuities, but also the derivative (the slope) of the signal should avoid discontinuities. A sharp cutoff at a zero crossing will feature a break in the slope even if there isn't a large jump in the signal itself.

This is also why a sinusoidal envelope is smoother -- because the slope of the envelope is itself a sinusoid (derivative of sin = cos and vice versa).

hjh

@jancsika said:

Actually the solution purposefully avoids that approach. Look inside [list-drip]: it was purpose-written to do an end-run around the performance problems that come from copying data downstream to be processed later.

I thought [list store] and a "get" message avoided the need to split the list.

The approach of incrementally building the sub-messages does indeed work in this case, but again only because the message payloads are "Pd sized" payloads. Add some configuration state for a "table" key that takes a 128 element payload are you might start to see problems (depending on when and how this configuration state gets set.)

So: One Pd weakness is that there is no mechanism to initialize a [list] object with no contents but n pre-allocated slots. If you could send a message, say, "alloc 20" to a [list prepend], then you would have a concatenator that could absorb 20 items before incurring the cost of allocating more slots. Currently there is no way to avoid that cost, even for short lists.

Concatenation is really useful. It would be better to support it well, rather than trying to find weird ways to avoid it.

At least when I look at OP's problem, I see global receiver names followed by messages.

That's a good insight.

hjh

@seb-harmonik.ar said:

@ddw_music said:

One way that this could be improved:

• Per patch file, keep a list of which locations have provided externals or abstractions.

• If it's the first time this subdirectory provided an object to this patch file, print a message in the console (help the user not overlook the dependency).

I don't think this is a good idea. It would clog up the console...

My two quoted suggestions here go together: If the patch object has a list internally of its dependencies, then it's possible to report a dependency only the first time it's accessed in a given patch file. If I open a new patch and create a [gate] and later a [play~], I would want to see a message about cyclone only once per patch file, not per cyclone object. Obviously the latter would be clutter but my suggestion as worded was intended to avoid excessive clutter: "If it's the first time this subdirectory provided an object to this patch file..."

• If there is a binary library in the access path, load it automatically. Do not make the user distinguish between lib and path.

I realized later that there's a flaw to this logic: you don't know which objects a library binary provides without loading the binary -- so in practice, object search might need to load all binaries Of course that would not be ok. It may be a solvable problem, if there's some way for a binary to make an object manifest known without fully initializing.

^^ This explains why search is non-recursive, so I'll have to drop my earlier comment about that.

• Have a menu option to print a list of dependencies. (If the list of external subdirectories is saved in the patch, this is easy.)

maybe there could be some kind of helper object or something in [pdcontrol] or [declare] that gets a list of all of the library or external dependencies of a patch when the user needs them. (or maybe some external would be better).

Sure, that would work. There's not a substantive difference between those approaches.

FWIW SuperCollider's "greedy" approach to loading extensions isn't totally ideal either -- because method dispatch is resolved at runtime, there's no way to know by scanning code whether a method call will hit an extension, or which one. I've been bitten by this more times than I can count. That's one reason why I switched my Pd teaching over to use [declare].

The -lib vs -path thing, though... sheesh, it's like "let's deliberately annoy users and drive them away" -- and that pull request is hilarious -- "hmm, but what if you want to declare a library that is called -path?" Really? This kind of bizarre hypothetical is why they would question an honest attempt to make life easier for users? "Oh, let's push this idea into limbo because of something that nobody with an ounce of common sense would ever do"

hjh

I know this has been asked a few hundred thousand times- i know because i've been reading everything i can find. But most of the documentation and posts are apparently outdated, or don't seem to work for me.

I had been learning pure data for a few weeks about a year ago using pd extended, but noticed that the libs haden't been updated for a long time, so when i got back into it yesterday i decided to start with the nonextended version.

At first i didn't realize that Gem isn't a standard library, so downloaded it, installed, eventually found that someone suggested to go to edit/preferences/startup, make a new entry and just type "gem" and add it. I did that, restarted. The log window still shows a lot of error messages, it looks like PD is searching for two files:

gem.dll
Gem.m_i386

There are a lot of lines that indicated tried and failed for both, but eventually i see "succeeded" for gem.dll, but not for Gem.m_i386.

Anyway i 'put' an object called gemwin and two messages, create and destroy and link them both to gemwin after creating a new project, then switch to run mode ctrl-e and click on create. Nothing happens. It should make a black, empty gem window, but it doesn't.

In the log window, there are no entries added after clicking on create/destroy, i don't know what i'm doing wrong, can someone suggest what to do?

I've been reading for hours, a lot of pages suggest where to look, but have dead links, or the suggestion didn't help, any ideas?

I pasted below the full startup log (the full log using the "all" option).

Thanks:)

Rob T

------------------ done with main ----------------------
input channels = 2, output channels = 2
Default font: DejaVu Sans Mono
tried ./Gem.m_i386 and failed
tried C:/Users/me/AppData/Roaming/Pd/Gem.m_i386 and failed
tried C:/Program Files (x86)/Common Files/Pd/Gem.m_i386 and failed
tried C:/Program Files (x86)/pd/extra/Gem.m_i386 and failed
tried ./Gem.dll and failed
tried C:/Users/me/AppData/Roaming/Pd/Gem.dll and failed
tried C:/Program Files (x86)/Common Files/Pd/Gem.dll and failed
tried C:/Program Files (x86)/pd/extra/Gem.dll and failed
tried ./Gem/Gem.m_i386 and failed
tried C:/Users/me/AppData/Roaming/Pd/Gem/Gem.m_i386 and failed
tried C:/Program Files (x86)/Common Files/Pd/Gem/Gem.m_i386 and failed
tried C:/Program Files (x86)/pd/extra/Gem/Gem.m_i386 and failed
tried ./Gem/Gem.dll and failed
tried C:/Users/me/AppData/Roaming/Pd/Gem/Gem.dll and failed
tried C:/Program Files (x86)/Common Files/Pd/Gem/Gem.dll and failed
tried C:/Program Files (x86)/pd/extra/Gem/Gem.dll and succeeded
GEM: Graphics Environment for Multimedia
GEM: ver: 0.93.3 
GEM: compiled: Nov 10 2011
GEM: maintained by IOhannes m zmoelnig
GEM: Authors :  Mark Danks (original version)
GEM:        Chris Clepper
GEM:        Cyrille Henry
GEM:        IOhannes m zmoelnig
GEM: with help by Guenter Geiger, Daniel Heckenberg, James Tittle, Hans-Christoph Steiner, et al.
GEM: found a bug? miss a feature? please report it:
GEM:    homepage http://gem.iem.at/
GEM:    bug-tracker http://sourceforge.net/projects/pd-gem/
GEM:    mailing-list http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/gem-dev/
GEM: compiled for SIMD architecture: SSE2 MMX 
GEM: using SSE2 optimization
The Pd window filtered 40 lines
The Pd window filtered 41 lines```

Hey

Once again I'm back on vista. My brief journey to puredyne goes something like this.

from puredyne
partitioned new hard drive with 4 partitions 1-swap , 2 ext4 200Gib, 1 NTFS 200GB . Copied Vista to NTFS partition with gparted(started to do this with dd but with new Gibabits stuff I was skeered but hey a platter is a platter and a cluster is a cluster right). Actually there was a 5th partition in there which was the vista restoration partition but I eventually deleted it for obvious reasons.

Removed old drive ,
took machine to ethernet connection with internet,
booted to vista ,
installed Norton virus scanner - only 1 virus, 2 tracking cookies, and one gain trickler after over a year with no virus scanner, Thats pretty good and shows you can be selective about what you download and where you visit on the web and not get any viruses.

Was trying to get windows movie maker to work with mov codec which it doesnt.
Installed auto updates for the first and only time. this took about 3 hours and still needed to install service pack 1, 2. Aborted trying to update win movie maker

****Problem 1***** MS movie maker does not work with GEM mov video output codec.

Installed latest Nvidia drivers for vista.
Woohooo OpenGl hardware acceleration GEM works so much better in vista now.

*****Problem 2********ASIO for all does not allow 2 applications to run with audio and midi at the same time. If I wanted to run Widi and play my guitar so puredata can receive midi input from guitar ASIO will not allow it but ASIO for all is the only way I can get latency down so this would be feasible.

Got frustrated.

Installed fresh copy of puredyne onto 2nd ext4 partition.
ran puredata audio latency good with fresh install. gem video bad.

used synaptics to install nvidia drivers. v185 I think.
ran GEm error no opengl config.

downloaded gdeb , flash player, google chrome, nvidia drivers from nvidia site.
installed gdeb from terminal, flash and chrome from gdeb.
rebooted to log in as root and iunstalled nvidia drivers.

woohoo hardware acceleration for opengl

******problem 3************
gem works great but audio glitches with puredata window visible.
when only gem window is visible i can unaudioglitchily move the mouse around to control same parameters that would normaly be controled with sliders in pd window.

Seems like before i upgraded nvidia video drivers hw:do o whatever it is, was listed in JackD as realtek HD Audio, now it is listed as NVIDIA HD Audio.

So Gem works great but not when Pd window is open and I think my audio drivers were replaced with Nvidia.

I would really like to get back to my patch and stop wasting time on these operating systems and hardware configurations I thought in the last 15 years all this hardware acelleration and autodetection would be figured out but no all we got is rc.0, rc.01, rc.02, rc, etc...... instead of just rc.d.

Ok I'm getting an error when I exit puredyne that says pid file not found is jackd running. anyone know what that means?

Also does anyone have a keymap for gem keyboard for linux, windows and mac so I don't have to record them.

Any suggestions about what to do about my ASIO problems in windows?
Any suggestions about my audio driver in Linux?
Any suggestions about my GEM mov video / windows incompatibilities?

I can import the mov video and audio to SF Acid 3.0 and output a 2Gb avi then import it into windows movie maker but this is crazy to do for a 7 minute 12fps 320x240 video.

Ahhhhhhhhh!
Any suggestions are welcome!

PS I believe someone could rewrite puredata's audio and video interface in assembly language to control their hardware before figuring out how to get these operating systems to do it.

Please excuse the cross posting:
PureData Bootcamp

Tuesday 1 September - Saturday 5 September

The Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama is proud to offer an intensive 5 day PureData workshop. PureData is a free and open source real-time graphical programming environment used by artists to create a range of visual arts, theatre, dance, audio, installation, performance and media art works.

This intensive boot-camp is designed for artists working in different media to explore the capabilities of PureData to create interactive environments, real-time sound design, physical modeling, manipulation of live visuals and interface authoring.

The course will culminate in a performance/ installation/ concert of the work realised during the week.

Participants are welcome to bring their own laptops, but full resources are provided.

To apply for this course, please download the registration form here or contact the Events Team to receive a registration form via email or post

Cost: £200 + VAT

***Early Bird Offer***
£100 + VAT
Only Until August 1st

How to Book
Complete the booking form and return, enclosing a cheque or credit card payment details, to: Events Team, Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama, Castle Grounds, Cathays Park, Cardiff CF10 3ER

For a hard copy of the booking form contact the Events Team on 029 2039 1391 or email: shortcourses@rwcmd.ac.uk

Although there is no application deadline, places are limited so early booking is recommended

Additional Information
If you have a disability please provide sufficient information at the time of booking so we can consider any special arrangements necessary

The restaurant at the College will be open at lunchtime for the purchase of hot and cold meals

Accommodation can be arranged through the College at Severn Point, the privately owned RWCMD Halls of Residence, at a cost of £20 per night. Severn Point offers indiviudal en-suite rooms which are arranged in flats of 6 bedrooms around a communal living and kitchen space. The Halls are aproximately 12 minutes walk from the College.

To book a place in the Halls of Residence please fill out the booking form and return to the Events Team 3 weeks before the start of your course.

If you require more information about any aspect of the accommodation please contact the Events Team on 029 20391 391.

Further Queries
If you have any queries about any aspect of this summer school please contact the Events Team on 029 20391 391

Terms and Conditions
This course is suitable for individuals aged 16 + only. All information is correct at the time of writing; however, should there be any changes to general information, course content or tutors, students will be informed prior to the start of the Summer School

For further information, contact: Events Team on 029 2039 1391

The reason why it's not working until you open [wrap~]'s help window is because audio needs to be turned on. The help patch does this automatically with:

[loadbang]
|
[; pd dsp 1(

So I'll try to explain how this patch works. It's based on using a master [phasor~] object for everything to sync to. I used beats per minute because Hz is the same thing as cycles per second. By dividing bpm by 60, you get beats (cycles) per second. It's just easier math (to me) than using ms, and it's more musically intuitive anyway.

The signal for the [phasor~] is multiplied by the beat division, scaling its range. So if you want the beat divided into four subdivisions (16th notes), it will be scaled up from 0-1 to 0-4. [wrap~] takes a signal and wraps it around so that it falls within a range of 0-1, so 2.3 will become .3, etc. It essentially just gives you the fractional part of a number. Sending the scaled up [phasor~] output to this results in a ramp that is synced to the subdivision. This is then subtracted by .5 to scale the range from -.5 to .5, just so there are some zero-crossings.

[zerox~] is used to detect the zero-crossings. It doesn't seem to have a helpfile, and I'm not sure what the difference between the to outputs are. I just know they very briefly spit out a 1 when crossing zero. [edge~] detects sudden jumps in a signal and outputs a bang, which is used to drive the counter.

It's just occured to me that [zerox~] detects zero-crossings going up and down, and I designed the patch with the idea that it should only detect signals crossing downward. So it's actually going twice as fast as it should! Dividing the bpm by 120 instead of 60 should remedy that.

Hope that helps.

Hey there.
I'm trying to biuld a patch which run realtime count-ups (in msec) between zero crossings.

I haven't sound the right modules necessary to do the tasks below.
I'd appreciate anyone's advice.

So, I need a counter that generates a streaming signal of upcounting time.
it needs to be resettable, and just keep counting upward. having some maximum time-argument or stop-out would help prevent stacks from overflowing.
the trick is, this needs to run at signal speed (default 44.1khz), and be able to stream out fractions of a millisecond,
thus, I can't use a metronome, because the metronome seems to only go down to 1 millisecond.
(unless I'm mistaken).

I need to reset these counters eveery time the signal crosses above and below zero, so I need some kind of comparitor signal unit, which outputs a bang only and exactly when the cross to one side is made.

I want to use this with a flip flop of sorts, which simply changes input status every time it recieves the bang.

I'd really appreciate it if anyone could:
...direct me to existing modules or applications/combinations that could do this kind of thing.
...refer me to existing abstractions that people have cooked up for this kind of thing.

cheers,
G...

Hi all.
I'm trying to connect to arduino using pduino 0.2. I have 0.38.4-extended distribution. When I load the test patch of pduino library i get the following errors:

OSCroute object version 1.05 by Matt Wright. pd: jdl Win32 raf.
OSCroute Copyright ? 1999 Regents of the University of California. All Rights Reserved.
O : Open Sound Control 4 PD, http://www.cnmat.berkeley.edu/OSC
S : original code by matt wright, pd hakcs cxc, Win32-port raf@interaccess.com
C: ver: 0.2, compiled: Mar 28 2004
iemlib1 (R-1.17) library loaded! (c) Thomas Musil 11.2006
musil@iem.at iem KUG Graz Austria
iemlib2 (R-1.17) library loaded! (c) Thomas Musil 11.2006
musil@iem.at iem KUG Graz Austria
iem_mp3 (R-1.17) library loaded! (c) Thomas Musil 11.2006
musil@iem.at iem KUG Graz Austria
iem_t3_lib (R-1.17) library loaded! (c) Gerhard Eckel, Thomas Musil 11.2006
musil@iem.at iem KUG Graz Austria
list split 1
... couldn't create
list-rev 2 0 3 1 (trigger->bang) connection failed
list-rev 3 0 4 1 (bang->bang) connection failed
list-rev 9 1 3 1 (trigger->bang) connection failed
list-rev 9 2 4 1 (trigger->bang) connection failed
analog 18 1 4 1 (trigger->bang) connection failed
comport - PD external for unix/windows
LGPL 1998-2005, Winfried Ritsch and others (see LICENCE.txt)
Institute for Electronic Music - Graz
Opened serial line device COM2

flatspace: can't load library in C:/Program Files/pd
blahsymbol: flatspace
iemlib: can't load library in C:/Program Files/pd
blahsymbol: iemlib
mapping: can't load library in C:/Program Files/pd
blahsymbol: mapping
arduino.pd 14 1 13 0 (comport->print) connection failed
error: $1: argument number out of range
error: $2: argument number out of range
Write error, maybe TX-OVERRUNS on serial line
Write error, maybe TX-OVERRUNS on serial line

As it can be seen in the log, i have iemlib installed, it sucessfully loads at startup, but i still get "iemlib: can't load library". I'm also having problems with flatspace and list split (as far as I've read in other forums and pd list, i should have both in my system).

What am i doing wrong?

THANKS!!!

> yes, probably. but now I'll try to run it on my Atari ST

Seriously try it if you get time one day. Oddly the Atari ST is still *THE* choice for some serious techno musicians. Why? The simplicity of how the UART is addressed and clocked gives it rock solid midi timing. It's something that seems to elude complex architectures even with the best preemptive scheduling, buffering etc. I've watched top producers take a midi file on floppy disk from their $5000 super Mac/PC systems to have it play back on an Atari for final mixdown. It's one of those analog vs digital type debacles where real experience of good ears trumps what "technically shouldn't be so". The ST lacks enough grunt for useful audio DSP, but as a midi processing hub or sequencer it could be an astonishingly powerful tool with pd if you can compile it.

>mhh... this is just a anthropomorphic vision of reality...

You got me.

>what I need to ask now is where I can find reference for all objects:
>I know that there's no menu of them and i have to type their name in those little boxes, but
>I need to know, at least, what objects I can create, typing their names, is it true?

Yeah that bothers me too. Even after using for it some time I forget the name of an atom and have to go looking for it. I often do something like "ls /usr/lib/pd/externs/ | grep pd_linux$ | less" to see if I actually have something. For windows likewise search the externals directory for .dll files

>so, I would like to have a list with the object identifier (for oscs, filters etc.), their
>details (kind of filters, slopes, ripples etc. for filters, as example ), their parameters (cutoff, Q, etc.)
>is there a documentation like this?

The help files are detailed, well written and easy to use. Once you know that such an object exists. Just right click any atom and select "help". Usually there's an example case.

Check these to find common atoms
http://puredata.hurleur.com/sujet-248-suggestions-noobs
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/courses/154/pd-reference.html
http://pure-data.sourceforge.net/documentation.php

>I know... but I still feel more confortable with a traditional language (C++, pascal), also
>for writing my personal VSTs (you know, for those weirdest things...) I think it's still easier to write "algorithms" with a textual language,
>without a graphical metaphore.

Raw code is not an expedient or practical way to make music. Having used Music(N), Csound, Nyquist (LISP/SCHEME), and all that stuff I can say this from the bottom of my heart after 15 years experience. Pd gives you two really important things from a software engineering point of view. It's modularity and clarity of interface in abstracting things just beats any C++ classes hands down for it's intended purpose - digital signal dataflows. Consequently you get better decoupling and better reuse. One of the few pitfalls for a trad programmer imho is that pd is very dirty on types, in a way it's one of the most badly typed languages I've ever experienced. Ironic for a tool called "pure data", but you get used to it's lovable idiosynchrocies vis lists, messages, numbers, arrays, symbols and generic "anys". Also it's scoping rules leave a lot to be desired, everythings global within one instance of the server unless you say $0- at the head of a name.

>But now I need to teach a course on "languages for electronic music" in classical, academic shool.
>they don't know DSP matchematics or something like,
>so I need to urgently search for use a more "abstract" instrument for doing the lessons...

You couldn't wish for a more appropriate tool. For non maths/physics students you can use the power of abstraction to build "black boxes" like synths, analysis tools and sequencers and then open them up later in the course. As Claude says, it takes about 9 months or more before you really take to PureData. Electronic music is BIG, really big, not as big as space but it's a discipline that just explodes in scope once you get into it. You can waste weeks writing externals in C, or designing a synth, or creating a composition method...you can get really lost on a random walk in d>2. The best way forward is to have a context and a goal. Teaching this course sounds like an excellent vehicle to focus your scope.

>Tried also Jmax but on Windows (required OS, because > 95% students use billgatesware ) is quite unstable

I would make it "unrequired". Put your foot down as course leader/tutor that Windows is unsuitable. In order of preference I would go with Mac, then Linux, then Win. If the students only have Windows then try Dyne:bolic ( http://dynebolic.org/ ), a minimal GNU/Linux distro that runs from a CD in RAM and comes preconfigured with PureData and a smorgasboard of other digital media tools. That said, I've seen it work really well on Windows. Once. I've no hard evidence to back this up, but I feel a disturbance in the force when Pd runs on Windows, as if a million threads cried out at once and were suddenly silenced. I don't think it likes heavily loaded machines and I guess 99% certain the reason it's unstable on Win is down to *other* things running. Hint: a music machine shouldn't double as an email server and GCHQ spyware centre. Start with a clean install and nothing else running and you may have better luck, but that will probably remain stable about as long as a schizophrenic Z-boson particle if you network it.