Hi there. This is my first post here, that's why it's a little big. I want to thank everybody in this incredible forum. I've learned much about Pure Data here, and it's unbelievable that such competent people like you guys actually spend time thinking about minor issues from newcomers like me. You even write elegant code for people, it's amazing.

I have a very important question, yet it's very simple I guess.

I've been studying Pure data for about a month and I'm enjoying very much. I'm a composer, mostly chamber music, but now interested in using this software to control live electronics parts in future compositions, play pre-recorded sound files, analyse aspects from standard instruments performances and reflect it in the begavior of the electronics parts, etc. (My first "serious" patch was one that hears the rhythm of a conventional instrument (via [bonk~]) and notates it on a table. Later the original rhytmic patterns can be reproduced, with controls for speed etc. I don't know if the solutions are the best ones, but it worked fine for claps or chord atacks captured by the mic.)

Well, to play in a concerto it's a big deal of responsability. And my worries are about the stability of the software. I use a Windows XP SP2 and an ASIO4all driver pluged in my onboard sound card. "Most" of times everything goes ok, but sometimes pure data freezes, or interrupt sound briefly, etc. Would it all disapear on a Mac? I really need an answer, because a Mac is very expensive here (Brazil) and it would be a huge $tep for me to buy one. Yet, even if I bought one, it would be a Macbook, wich I is not the stronger setup, I guess. I was studying super collider and quit, because many functions don't run well in windows. Too bad.

Also, I was experimenting with fiducials detection from aktivision and pure data. PD really suffers, with glitches, stuttering, etc because of the stream of OSC information from the camera, i guess. Strangely, Max 4.6 worked smoothier. But I don't want to buy a max. I really love this art freedom pure data allows, but ...

Oh I forgot this: I saved arrays contents with the patches (about 15Mb from 6 .wav files in 6 arrays), and whenever I load the patch pure data takes very much to respond (about a minute to respond to any mouse click). I don't need a solution right now, I'll find in the forum better ways to load samples than saving arrays contents. It's just to you to konw the problems I'm having. After that minute the program becomes responsible again.

I apprecciate any help in this matter: Is Mac the salvation??? I never touched one

My PC is a Intel, Core 2 Duo E4400 2Gz with 2 Gb RAM.

Best regards
PeterAndTheWolf
ps: sorry for any problems in my English.

There should be no difference, the PC route is definately cheaper though. When you buy a Mac you get a pretty box and OS X (which is effectively Linux)...You could always install Ubuntu Studio on your PC which has PD amongst other things. Quite a solid system so I hear.

Personally i've ended up on a mac, probably because of my job. But I wouldn't not use a Pc

><>I apprecciate any help in this matter: Is Mac the salvation??? I never touched one

nah, a mac probably would clear up your problem with soundcard drivers and whatnot, and it's pretty stable, crash free, etc...but there are just as many disadvantages: the pd program itself runs worse on mac, the gui is REALLY slow, so if you make sequencers and stuff with sliders and toggles, the gui quickly slows down. i wouldn't really recommend it.

>>"Most" of times everything goes ok, but sometimes pure data freezes, or interrupt sound briefly, etc.<<

this might not be system-specific. it might be because of what you are doing in pd. if you are trying to load a large soundfile in realtime for example, you'll almost certainly get audio dropouts. there are also a lot of ways to overload pd and cause it to freeze or dropout. using external objects can also be troublesome sometimes if the code has not been implemented correctly.
then again, your troubles might just be with your soundcard driver and system, it's hard to tell without re-creating the freeze or dropout and finding its source.

as for operating systems,
if you want to go with linux, then it is not too hard to install 'ubuntustudio' linux distribution, and your existing computer would run it very well. learning how to use linux is probably roughly comparable to learning how to use pd. it needs a bit of time at first, and the learning curve is a little bit steep, but once you get the hang of it, it's really good.

not sure if any of this helps, but i guess the basic thing i want to say is that there is no 'simple, perfect solution'. for me, pd runs best on linux. better than it did on mac.

@hardoff said:

the pd program itself runs worse on mac, the gui is REALLY slow, so if you make sequencers and stuff with sliders and toggles, the gui quickly slows down.

I wonder if this will change in the upcoming Pd-extended release (0.41.4). Apparently the later Tcl/tk version fixes this

yeah i hope so. it (the gui on osX) was getting progressively worse for a while.

I am using Pd on my MacBook Pro 2.2GHz with 2GB of RAM, and honestly have never experienced any kind of gui problem - some of the patches I have consist of lots of guis, even some my own design. The only problem I ever had was Pd crashing while opening a heavily gui loaded patch, for which breaking patch into smaller pieces is a solution working pretty well.

I've been using Pd for almost 2 years, started on pc, and about a year ago switched to Mac. I made many live performances Pd running on both platforms. I can absolutely tell that, Mac makes a huge difference in terms of reliability -especially when it comes to live processing through elaborately designed patches that requires hell of a cpu performance (which seems what you want to go for peterandthewolf). I know Mac is a little expensive, but if you have money it worths every cent of it. If not, I had many friends running Pd on Ubuntu Studio, which also seems pretty reliable.

Oh god, thank you very much guys. That's exactely what I wanted, opinions based on experience. I'm going to stick to PC for a while then, and learn as much as I can about PD, since all of you find that the OS is not such a huge matter.

I tried UBUNTU about two years ago, and used it for 6 months, but I really need a few softwares that have no linux version, like finale. I'm gonna give UbuntuStudio a try, maybe in a dual system.

In the future I'll try to buy a MAC for the "non-crashability" aspect, that would be useful for other things too.

Thanks. I appreciated your opinions,
much more confident now.
P&TW

@hardoff said:

yeah i hope so. it (the gui on osX) was getting progressively worse for a while.

was that the reason you went to Linux?

If your intention is to use windows to develop and linux to perform, your patches should be portable between windows and linux. In fact going from windows to linux should be easier since the latter has certain pd features the former doesn't.

But watch out for case insensitive filesystems. In windows and mac the filesystem is case preserving but not sensitive, while linux has mostly case sensitive filesystems. For PD this means that under linux you can have two distinct patches, ex: Not.pd and not.pd while in windows this would not be allowed. Porting from windows to linux this example shouldn't be a problem, but you might have an abstraction patch saved as not.pd and use it as "NOT" in another patch. Under windows this will work since "NOT" will be matched to not.pd, but under linux it won't work since it will be looking for NOT.pd

thanks for the notes about naming files saturno. I don't have many patches now, but it would be a problem rename stuff in a lot of patches in the future.

The problems gone away with domien's idea. I'm loading samples on startup now.

Thx guys

@boonier said:

@hardoff said:

yeah i hope so. it (the gui on osX) was getting progressively worse for a while.

was that the reason you went to Linux?

no. a cracked logic board on the mac was the reason

but i'm happy i got forced to use linux. it's ace.

good advice there from saturno about filenaming conventions.