[PD] Cyclone in vanilla?

Andy Farnell padawan12 at obiwannabe.co.uk
Fri Apr 25 16:46:20 CEST 2008


On Fri, 25 Apr 2008 09:52:43 -0400
Julian Peterson <julianpeterson at mac.com> wrote:


> if you write a PD patch, you can give it to anyone with a reasonably  
> modern computer; they will be able to download PD on their machine/OS  
> and execute with full rights and privileges.


For the last 2 years I have very much kept democratisation of tools
and universal access in the front of my mind.

The entry barrier to any career should always be hard work and learning
and not access to an elite club of expensive tools. The computing/IT 
economy has blossomed because our generation had access to C compilers
and cheap hardware as we grew up. I hope the next generation of sound
designers will enjoy the same opportunity of commodity tools.

At one time I seriously considered using Max because of the readership
potential and it was better known within sound design circles. Perhaps
my efforts in this area are starting to pay off because I think that has
changed. Several job specifications I've seen lately from games developers
venturing into procedural audio have mentoned Pd, not Max.

Another thing I've tried to do with the book is keep all examples
working within < 800MHz CPU requirements. 

That said, beyond using Pd as the teaching vehicle I tried to keep
an implementation agnostic approach, with the idea that if you
understand the algorithm and model you can implement a sound object
in Pd, Max, CPS or any in-house proprietry synthesis framework.

Being able to translate synthesis models between Csound, Pd, Max
or whatever is a skill that comes with time. Automatic translation
or import scripts are useful for sure, but I think we should recognise
that they have now diverged into different things.

Since I still believe Pd is the superior design application (by miles) a
far more useful automated path would be to spit out Faust symbolic
DSP algebra from Pd patches so you could compile patches into externals,
Max objects, VST plugins or stand-alone applications.

a.









-- 
Use the source




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