I'm working on a live arranger for midi phrases like those of the accompanying arranger keyboards, but not as limited to a few pattern including intros, fills and endings. I want it >bigger< .

My question:
Are there synchronizable and tempo adjustable midi players for pd available?

Ableton Link is available now in PD. You can get it on Deken by searching for "abl_link~".

http://cdm.link/2016/11/free-jazz-now-ableton-link-sync-works-pure-data/

And is this just a link between live and pd or is it a suit of patches that function like live?

It's a metro link between Live and PD, and anything else that can run Ableton Link (which is a lot of software, not only Ableton). No suite of patches, I think.

A paper about it was included in the PDCon 2016 proceedings:

http://www.nyu-waverlylabs.org/pdcon16/proceedings/

I'm not using anything like live or the supported software. I want to use pd stand alone for my purposes, actually. Nevertheless great news to see pd integrate or connect to the actual standard in music production!

What about recording or converting midi files to arrays?

@elden mrpeach midi is able to record in a midi file, but an array hum I don't know.
https://puredata.info/downloads/mrpeach

Cheers~

@elden You could maybe rip some bits from this....... array_sequencer_lfo.pd ..... feeding it with real midi data rather than a histogram..... and link up the useful bits with bits of the patch @LiamG pointed you to...

Of course Data Structures were (more or less) made for this purpose.......
... see Pd/Doc/4.data.structures/07.sequencer.pd
David.