[PD] Refactoring a PD patch

Andy Farnell padawan12 at obiwannabe.co.uk
Wed Dec 12 01:16:07 CET 2007





It's impossible to prescribe any certain way to patch, it's a bit of an art
and very personal, but I have established a kind of pattern that I seem to
follow and always try to tidy up patches into this form. This is mainly for
DSP, synthesis and effects...


Any inlets lined up along the top. Signal to the left, control to the right.
Input preconditioners, max, min, clip, >=, == etc
Scales and offsets all lined up
Any [receive] or [delread] that form part of a loop within the patch need to
come out near the top

Then, however many parallel sets of:

All intermediate variable calculations, cutoffs, filter coeffs, converting 
periods to freq, midi to freq etc

Primary signal sources, noise, phasor, osc
Shaping functions
Output conditioners, limiters, volume, DC traps etc

Other rules;

Things with cohesive function are clustered together
Things that feed back or to side chains are offset sideways
No patch cords ever run on top of each other
Avoid cords passing over another inlet en route to destination
Fan outs 1:n greater than 3 are arranged symmetrically around a vertical center
line
Fan ins n:1 (n>3) the same


How you can parse the file and identify any of this is a damn hard problem imho.





On Tue, 11 Dec 2007 17:34:49 -0600
"Mike McGonagle" <mjmogo at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hey,
> I was contemplating the idea of what it would take to write a program that
> reads a PD abstration and produces something that "TRIES" to clean up the
> appearance of the patch. From the discussion of segmented lines, and from
> seeing some other people's patches, it made me wonder if anyone else has
> tried to write a program that will attempt to clean up the tangled mess that
> some patches come to...
> 
> I have some ideas about how to do this, but wanted to first check out to see
> if others have already attempted this sort of thing, and if they found it to
> be fruitful.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Mike
> 
> 
> -- 
> Peace may sound simple_one beautiful word_ but it requires everything we
> have, every quality, every strength, every dream, every high ideal.
> _Yehudi Menuhin (1916_1999), musician
> 


-- 
Use the source




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