Hello,

I migrated from Pd Extended to Vanilla (0.47-1) a few days ago. I've tried to familiarize myself with the handling of externals and the Deken manager, which seems to slowly become more understandable the more I work with it.

But today I've run into some odd issues I never experienced with Pd-extended.

– First of all, the console is a mess of "tried to load, failed" and "tried to load, succeeded" at every start up, which is understandable, but I can't seem to figure out what to take from it. Sometimes I get both the "failed" and "succeeded" version of a message one after the other, regarding the same library/external. Sometimes it will claim to have failed trying to load a given external, but I can call up the objects just fine without having to [declare] or use the [name/*object] initialization.

I would assume that I have made too much of a mess trying to add the paths to "path" and "start up". So I guess it's trying to look for certain things in subfolders where it's not? The issue is that everything seems to load up correctly, but I still get a ton of misleading console messages.

– This one is odd. After having loaded up Pd and scrolling up through the console's many, many messages, I will get to the "credits" message of the zexy external, but it will lag and freeze for a moment before reaching it, sometimes multiple times before allowing me to scroll by it smoothly.

– I tried to continue work on a patch, a 4 channel random sample player. The gui elements will sometimes freeze after pressing play and running everything, which renders all gui elements unresponsive, though I can still operate the patch, but just with no update. From here on out I can't close any patches or windows, nor can I go into patch mode, I simply have to close down Pd and open it again.

I understand that many gui elements can be taxing, but I really haven't got a lot of them going on. I have worked on patches far more graphically taxing in Pd-extended without any problems what so ever. In fact, I've never had any issues like this with Pd-extended.

There is some [metro] objects banging at 100 ms intervals to update the 4 individual audio arrays, but stopping those didn't seem to help a whole lot.
Everytime a sample has ended, it will bang and choose a new sample for immediate playback, sometimes the whole patch system seemed to stop, seemingly as if not being able to handle the stream of information. Again, no issues in Pd-extended.

I hope you'll be willing to help me out here. I suspect that the first order of business is to clean up the "path" and "startup" menus to clear up the system, but I'm unsure about how I would go about that.

Thank you
M.

@Hasselbalch Hey! As far as the externals/objects issues, I made a post on my Pd member page with folks like you in mind: https://puredata.info/Members/derekxkwan/pdext-to-pd/ . Hope it helps.

Hello Dxk,
Yours are the exact instructions I tried to follow a few days ago.

As of now, I'm still a whole lot wiser. As far as I've understood, libraries that are contained in a single file are to be added to the "startup" for load at start-up. Libraries consisting of a folder with multiple, separate files should be added to "path".

First off, the Deken manager downloads the libraries to a folder called "extra", not "pd-externals" or something similar. I've got no folder called that. I couldn't access the folder through the "choose folder"-prompt, since I have to access the contents of the Pure Data application, so I had to create a desktop shortcut to which I could easily choose the "extra"-folder when adding paths to "path".

This is what I am greeted with on start-up.

And it just keeps going all the way down. It seems to go through the contents of the libraries, but gives me a failed message. I now see that it looks for the contents of the zexy library in the folder of cyclone and tries to look for the files in neighbouring folders. Why would it do that?

But, say I call up an object I know only exists in an external library, say, cyclone's [cycle~] object, I will get this:

The first few lines show that it's trying to look for the library contents in my main folder (users/marc). I can't see why it would try that. It then tries the paths, fails, but then succeeds.

This is what my "startup" and "path" folders look like, respectively:

And the contents of the "extra" folder:

Thank you, in advance.

@Hasselbalch So the objects are instantiating fine it looks like, right? You're just getting a bunch of those messages? Verbose just prints out everywhere Pd knows to look (its "paths", both the default paths listed on the pd website and the the ones you added yourself under Prefereces > Paths). Pd does this even if you turn off verbose and it doesn't really hurt anything, so you can go ahead and turn off verbose and not worry about it.

Also, it looks like you're on Mac so your folder would be ~/Library/Pd or /Library/Pd instead of ~/pd-externals like it is for me on Linux.