Hi folks,

I'm building a patch (my first proper one) in Pd-vanilla for a sound installation for school. I've had to learn fast as the deadline is Friday morning 09.00 GMT+2.

I'm getting an odd error. One of my subpatches contains a bunch of abstractions which sample the adc input every ~107ms and play back a sound file if the input exceeds a certain threshold.

The actual sample playback mechanism was copied from C05.sampler.oneshot.pd.

Now, when I make noise into my mic, Pd spits out this set of errors in the main window:

$cutoff$1-1: not enough arguments supplied
$phase$1-1: not enough arguments supplied
$cutoff$1-1: not enough arguments supplied

Now in copying the sampler, I changed the names of variables from the format 'cutoff1' to 'cutoff$1-1' so that I could use a unique creation argument for each abstraction (which also corresponds to the arrays containing the sound files).

The abstraction ONLY uses ONE dollarsign, and that's $1.

Any thoughts? I can't really upload my patch for now, sorry - I'll try tomorrow if possible but assume I can't.

The title says it all

I'm new to Pd, but doing okay as I used to play with Reaktor a lot and have a few scraps of programming knowledge from high school. But I'm wondering: what do folks actually do with Pd? Why use Pd and not Max/MSP, Reaktor, or another similar package? What does Pd enable you to do that you can't achieve with modern DAWs?

I'm still experimenting, but my goal is to create generative music and art. I live in Cape Town, which just got named World Design Capital for 2014, so there's some scope for the arts but to my knowledge generative art hasn't really made its way here yet. I've chosen Pd as it's free and cross-platform, which means in the end I might be able to distribute my compositions to all sorts of PCs and mobile devices. What's the point of making music without an audience?

I'm also interested in electronics - I've got a TI Launchpad shipping my way right now, and Pd gives me an easy way to integrate it with my PC.

Quick question about $0: exactly how 'local' is it? If I use it in a subpatch, is the random number localised to that subpatch only (and therefore inaccessibe from the patch that contains it)?

...Never mind, just figured it out. Of course I only get it after typing this huge post on my cellphone...

I enjoyed that

Depends on how you use it, of course. The classic way is to use waveshaping, which simply means you use an oscillator as the input into a function of whatever sort. You can do this using arrays; first write the function into an array with [tabwrite~], then put an [osc~] into a [tabread4~].

lol, that's not very helpful

I know the right inlet expects a float...

I'm going to study electronic engineering next year and there's a DSP class in second year. I can't wait

Tremolo is just volume modulation. Multiply your signal with an LFO. For a Leslie sim, you want the tremolo to trail the panning and vibrato (you should be using vibrato, btw, not chorus) by 90 degrees so quadrature oscillators are what you need - not sure how that's done in Pd.