[PD] real-time audio processing

[Christoph GRONEGRESS]

Hi,
I'm trying to get a real-time sound analysis (fft, some time-domain stuff, 
maybe convolution if that works) from one or two microphone inputs working in 
pd. Since I'm not a sound person, I am having problems with a number of 
things, and was wondering if someone could help me with that.
I'm slightly confused about how pd handles files, because as it seems to me 
there are several operators to load files, but I don't know which one's the 
correct one for reading from a channel. Second, whenever I connect more than 
two functions with each other they don't seem to work anymore, which is mainly 
because I don't know what input/output they assume (and the help files don't 
seem to know either), resulting mostly in errors.
Finally, I would like to send the results to a C program: is there anything 
that allows me to do that other than writing things to a file, and opening it 
from the 'main' program?
thanks
christoph