[PD] Max Smoother Audio than Pd?

[Roman Haefeli]

On Sun, 2010-03-28 at 11:44 +0200, Frank Barknecht wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 10:07:29AM +0100, Roman Haefeli wrote:
> > Is it time for having a pool for Pd-made music? There was the Pd radio
> > which I quite liked. Would it require a lot of effort to bring it up
> > again?
> 
> Not quite the same, but as you know, http://rjdj.me has hours and hours of
> Pd-made music, albeit in 22050 Hz, so it's not exactly a showcase for the most
> hifi Pd sounds possible. Still I find many of these to be pretty good sounding.

Totally. Thanks for posting. These are good examples and they show, that
you can create complex textures and smooth sounds even without using
fancy externals and the help of ready-made VSTs. And hey, that is coming
out from an iPhone, a computer with rather weak processing power. And
no, it's not all sample based.

> Regarding the smoothness of Max/Pd/etc. lets heed to the words of our
> grandfather Max Mathews: 
>   
>   "Max and Pd allow almost anyone to synthesize uninteresting timbres almost
>   instantly. Making interesting timbres is much more difficult and requires much
>   additional knowledge."
>   http://crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/techniques/latest/book-html/node5.html

This reminids me of:
"Making boring techno music is really easy with modern tools, but with  
live coding, boring techno is much harder." - Chris McCormick

> It's not so much the tool, as it is the skills that makes music sound good. If
> you use a [phasor~] as a sawtooth oscillator source, you're "wrong" in both Max
> and Pd.

I fully agree. My feeling is when it comes to producing (more
popular/club-oriented/mainstream oriented) music, the difference between
using Pd and using ready-made software from the market is mainly the
fact, that the Pd way requires much more an effort to prepare the
environment someone is heading for, which doesn't necessarily mean it is
less feasible to do. Additionally, Pd allows for projects like RjDj.
IMHO, using Pd also for creating boring techno is still valid and I
think it is fun. 

Roman