I'm a software and artificial life guy collaborating with a computer music person. I'm knowledgeable about software and unix/OS X, but not very knowledgeable about Max and Pure Data, yet. I'm working on Mac OS X 10.4.1.

My collaborator created a nifty patch in Max that I'm trying to port to Pd. Per the directions (and despite the warnings about how hard this whole endeavor was likely to be) I changed the .pat extension to .pd and tried to open it in Pd... No luck. I get these error messages:

error: : no such object
error: other: no such object

After a little research I find out about Krzysztof Czaja's "cyclone" project at <http://suita.chopin.edu.pl/~czaja/miXed/externs/cyclone.html>, that is supposed to go a long ways towards improving compatibility between Max and Pd. I download and build it successfully.

It's not clear where to put the build products (plain and ~ libraries it looks like), so I place them all in the same directory as the actual "pd" executable, deep inside the latest Pd-0.38-0test4HCS4.app/Contents/Resources/bin. I also add "-lib cyclone" to my .pdrc file. This correctly loads the cyclone library. However, it doesn't help with opening the Max patch. Same errors.

That's okay, because you're supposed to use -lib maxmode for maximum compatibility, so I replace "-lib cyclone" with "-lib maxmode" in my .pdrc, with high hopes. But maxmode will not load, and produces this error in Pd's window:

maxmode: can't load library

Trying some things from the command-line in Terminal, there's a hint that there might be a version compatibility problem between cyclone and Pd.

Does anyone know if cyclone requires an earlier PD, perhaps, like 0.37?

Any other suggestions for getting maxmode working?

Any other hints about how to successfully port this Max patch into Pd?

Following up my own post...

Grabbing Pd 0.37 from SourceForge and installing it, I see you get cyclone automatically. However, launching Pd 0.37, still invoking -lib maxmode in my .pdrc file, I get the same error message that maxmode could not be loaded. And, of course, my Max patch file still can't be opened.

Anything else I can try before I have to abandon Pd and move to Max?

Still talking to myself, but a tiny bit more info...

Using -lib cyclone instead of -lib maxmode there is no error, and I see there is a pop-up menu in the file open dialog that lets you select Max files instead of Pd files. I try this and loading the patch produces no errors, but neither does it open a window (it displays nothing at all).

I can tell the installation is fine, since opening any of the Help tutorial patches works as expected.

Help?!?!

_I see there is a pop-up menu in the file open dialog that lets you select Max files instead of Pd files. I try this and loading the patch produces no errors, but neither does it open a window (it displays nothing at all). _

I've never used cyclone, but...

Quoting from the Pd list:

_*File->Open is obsolete* for loading max patches. Instead, create
a [cyclone] object and click on it. It should load max-text,
max-binary, and even the max-old format (which max itself does not
load anymore...) _

Another message suggest that you can switch cyclone between normal mode and max compatability mode using messages, although I didn't find out how.

Thank you, CM, that sounds perfect, and I see the advice is from Krzysztof himself. But, I'm sorry I have to ask, what is a "[cyclone] object"?

I found another quote from Krzysztof on the subject of importing Max patches into Pd:

first of all, neither Pd itself, nor cyclone, opens max patches
ready for use. There is always lots of hard manual work involved,
unless the patch has been designed to be portable. Second, the
`open' command in Pd does not handle newer max patches. You need
cyclone's import feature, hidden under a mouse-click over
a [cyclone] object.

So apparently one creates a [cyclone] object in Pd and clicks on it in order to import Max files. Now if I can just figure out how to create a [cyclone] object...

Okay! In case another newbie finds this thread...

The trick is simple:

* Launch Pd
* Open a new window ("New" under the "File" menu)
* Put a new object in the window ("Object" under the "Put" menu)
* Type "cyclone" (without the quotes) into the new object
* Leave editing mode ("Edit mode" under the "Edit" menu)
* Click on this new cyclone object
* Navigate to the Max .pat file you want to import

This has done the trick for me, sort of. The text and objects in the imported file aren't perfectly aligned, but the patch looks mostly correct. However, as predicted, the imported patch doesn't work, and the error messages I see in the log are a bit too cryptic for me, being neither Pd- nor Max-proficient. Sigh.