[PD-dev] PD externals/extras/OSC and RT and JACK

[Ken Restivo]

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I've started playing with PD, and so far I am really enjoying it.

I'm using the Debian Sid package (0.40.2-2) on an amd64 (Intel Core 2 Duo) system, using JACK. Everything seems to work perfectly. In fact, PD is the only music language that works at all out-of-the-box on this 64-bit hardware. 

So far I'm finding what I need in the docs and via Google. A couple things still evade me though:

1) PD doesn't seem to run in realtime mode when using the -rt flag. The docs say that this requires "root mode", but that doesn't make any sense. JACK and dozens of softsynths work in RT mode as a non-root user, using PAM (new method) or capabilities module. But I'm not sure how to get PD to do that.

2) I'm confused by the Debian puredata package versus pd-externals and  pd-extended. I found an ancient package of pd-externals, but it seems that some (vu, for example) of those are now in the main puredata package. However others (cheby~, for example) aren't. The only one I really need is the ladspa~ external, but I'm not sure where to find it or how to install it without clobbering or interfering with the main puredata package.

3) I found the source to OSCx on SourceForge, but it looks ancient (i.e. from 2002), which includes it's own statically-linked (and very old) version of libosc. Is that really the latest release? I'm thrilled that PD makes working with MIDI so easy, but I am going to want to use OSC too.

4) I can't seem to figure out how to save audio settings such that pd starts up JACK and ALSA MIDI upon startup. Every time I start it, I have to manually go into the Media menu, and select JACK, and tell it how many audio ports (it doesn't remember), and select the ALSA-MIDI dialog box and tell it how many MIDI ports (it *does* remember that), before it opens the ALSA port. I'd like both to happen automatically at startup. I'm using "pd -rt -jack  -alsamidi" but it seems to disregard those.

5) I was able to locate and run the flext and py sources (separately from all of the above), and build and install them. So far PD has been straightforward enough that I haven't had any need to mess around with embedded python, but it was nice to be able to build an external with no trouble.

Thanks!

- -ken
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