[PD] Max Smoother Audio than Pd?

Jonathan Wilkes jancsika at yahoo.com
Thu Mar 25 19:10:39 CET 2010



--- On Thu, 3/25/10, Matteo Sisti Sette <matteosistisette at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Matteo Sisti Sette <matteosistisette at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [PD] Max Smoother Audio than Pd?
> To: porres at gmail.com
> Cc: "PD list" <pd-list at iem.at>
> Date: Thursday, March 25, 2010, 6:17 PM
> > So, I think this is an important
> myth to get over...
> 
> Well that seems a kinda "biased" approach :)
> 
> 
> Whenever anybody says that "Max sounds smoother than Pd"
> (or viceversa of course) we should force him to answer these
> three questions:
> 
> 1) define "smoother", what the hell does it mean (is it
> less clicks/pops? is it less dropouts? or what else?)
> 
> 2) are you comparing with the same hardware?
> 
> 3) Let me see the patches (ok this is not a question - this
> is a demand, lol)

You don't even need to do 1).  You could take examples from both 
environments (being as careful as possible to make the patches identical 
and have everyone listen and judge on the same hardware) 
and do a blind test on which sound is smoother/better/etc.  If the 
results clearly favor sound a over sound b, either there is something to 
it or something was screwy in one of the patches.

Sounds like someone at cnmat played around with the whole Max vs. 
Supercollider question a while back (though it was just two people):
http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/user/john_maccallum/blog/2008/08/22/max_msp_v_supercollider_part_1

Somebody in the Max forum mentioned in the blog addressed how the software 
interface may influence perception of sound quality.  I think that's 
important to keep in mind-- if you're switching back and forth between 
Max and Pd to compare sounds many other things might be influencing your 
judgment.

-Jonathan


      




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