He is better to program graphically (PD) or by text (Csound)? Somebody can describe the advantages of both? It is better Csound, Supercollider, Chuck, Nyquist? Thanks

I can understand your issues with NI. I feel unduly bitten by their upgrade pricing, especially being a Reaktor user. Nevertheless, the money does appear to fund software development, so no complaints.

The characteristic sounds of any and all software and hardware come to grate on me with time. I can't decide if I should rotate my stock more often, or just work harder to exploit and derange each piece of kit without concern for the petty details. I may be procrastinating as well...

Yeah, that's probably it. Thanks for the living seq info.

Darrell

obi you mentioned some environments for building plugins. I have done some reading on faust. Perhaps you could elaborate on some of those.
I was considering exploring some of these for DSP purposes. I am going to be processing a number of audio streams simultaneously. I was thinking it might be more efficient to code a few externals and then wire em together in PD, rather than doing everything in PD. I don't know much about how PD works under the hood. Perhaps this idea is un-necessary.
any info would be cool.

I have done some C++ if that helps.

Flext is another good development aid in C++ because you can create Max and Pd externs from the same code.

Faust takes this to an extreme. You write code in a pseudo algebra and it has a bunch of transformers/templates that can make VST plugins, LADSPA, Max and Pd externs or stand alone applications, very nice!

I haven't done amazing things with it, too busy wrtiting in Pd atm, but it is a useful tool.

Also been talking to a chap called Rurik lately who made some VSTs doing similar things to my sound effects, but he chooses SynthEdit for his work. Unfortunately I don't think it can export Pd or Max externs, just VSTs.

I would try doing whatever you want in plain Pd first and only go to externals if

It isn't fast enough
ii) You hit a programming problem that is very inelegant in Pd but easy in C

I think Csound is oldest than Pd. Csound ids generation type of music-N, you need two file first is orchestra file for design your generator and second is instrumen file there is have ftable and controlling for variable and parameter instrument

Digging up an old thread...

obi, you mentioned:

"...How Pd achieves its speed is that it uses practical approximations that will run in a guaranteed time. Pd is less accurate than Csound in most uses because it cuts some corners, but for the mostpart you don't hear these much..."

I'm fascinated to learn precisely what the approximations and corners the pd employs. Are you able to elaborate?

@Osc~ I've heard that PD uses cheap wave tables for oscillators. C Sound and SC people are always bragging on their "superior" oscillators.

Not sure on the details, but that could be one thing.

setting the wavetable for the oscili opcode is left entirely up to the user, so one can create a table that is 2^16 (65536 samples) and fill it with a sine wave. Larger tables tend to alias less, or at least aliasing starts to occur at relatively higher frequencies. This is also affected by the interpolation the opcode employs - 4 point cubic, 6 point hermite etc. Pd uses 4-point interpolation at its best by default, but this doesn't mean that an external can't be used, in fact check this thread: http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2008-07/063475.html

Equally in csound you can use the cheapest opcodes and smallest tables and it sounds particularly guff.

I can't really see a reason why Pd can't produce a hifi sound as good as Csound. THe trade off for realtime audio performance is that there are some minimal quality reductions in certain areas to save on cpu, but that doesn't mean you intrinsically can't recoup those savings...

I'm no dsp guru or a dsp developer per se; maybe someone could chime in an correct me? But I've used other environments and read a lot over the years

My personal experience is just that Csound comes with more sound generators and fancy effects/processors/etc. (there's no Csound-extended; they just add stuff if they think someone will like it). So it's easy to get something sounding better if there's already pre-built band-limited oscillators to work with. In Pd, you have to built them or find one someone else built. But as boonier said, there's plenty of cheap crap in Csound, too, and if you use opcodes that are direct analogues to Pd objects, any difference in sound will likely be negligible.

Incidentally the first bandlimited oscillators that spring to mind are the blosc~ family in the creb library. They cover square and sawtooth, but it would be nice if they extended to triangle. THere are other sets I believe tho...