[PD] Does Pd have a "sound"?

[Pagano, Patrick]

Yes it does and it make awesome drum machines, nice samplers and gorgeous reverbs and delays. A lot of dopes are into modular and feel the need to decry the last thing they were into because they are really just fanboys for DSP now like they were for baseball cards or other things the collected. I like both and pd still is the best computer program ever. Followed by Max then SC3. ❤️

Sent from my iPhone

> On Feb 15, 2016, at 9:57 AM, Claude Heiland-Allen <claude at mathr.co.uk> wrote:
> 
>> On 14/02/16 22:27, Matti Viljamaa wrote:
>> Do you think Pd has a characteristic sound to it? Or whether
>> discussion board threads claiming Pd (and Max) have a distinct (and
>> not good) sound just have people who haven’t listened to good
>> patches?
> 
> Some issues with Pd that affect sound character:
> 
> 1. cos~ (and osc~) use a small table with linear interpolation, which means there is quite a lot of interpolation noise - I wrote about it here: http://mathr.co.uk/blog/2015-04-21_approximating_cosine.html
> 
> 2. vcf~ (and probably other recursive filters) use single precision floating point in the feedback loop (pd-double might be different) which causes weird rounding artifacts - I wrote about it here: http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2010-08/082104.html
> 
> 3. cubic interpolation (tabread4~ etc) in Pd uses an (imho) incorrect algorithm - it makes a curve that goes through 4 points instead of matching the derivatives at the nearest 2 points, which leads to sharp corners at the original sample points with associated aliasing artifacts - this has been discussed on the lists many times in the past, for example here: http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2008-06/062864.html and: http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2010-03/077278.html
> 
> 4. sig~ (and implicit sig~ from float messages to signal inlets) is steppy and only takes effect at block boundaries - compare with .kr in SC3 which is (afaik) linearly interpolated between each block boundary
> 
> 5. Pd doesn't print enough digits to perfectly reconstruct floating point values when round-tripping through files, so (eg) biquad~ coefficients can become imprecise if you don't write them outside Pd in a text editor
> 
> 6. other systems tend to come bundled with more nice-sounding stuff like bandlimited oscillators etc, with Pd you tend to have to find externals yourself (deken should make that easier now)
> 
> 
> Claude
> -- 
> http://mathr.co.uk
> 
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