[PD] Hi, new user. Question about max/msp and PD

[Michal Seta]

On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 11:15 PM, Simon Wise <simonzwise at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/09/10 08:05, jm jones wrote:
>>
>> "I like the free-software nature of PD, but besides that, I want to
>> know the pros and cons of the two environments.
>
> 1/ If you need *extremely* low latency, and are prepared to put in the
> effort required to tweak and maintain your system carefully, then you can
> get lower latency on a Linux system, Max does not run on Linux.

I am not sure to what extent this statement is correct.  Apparently
people are capable to obtain very low latencies with both MacOS and
Windblows.  Up until recently getting low latency was not easy in
Linux.  And in any case, tweaking a system for maximum performance and
maintaining a system is difficult on any OS (well, it requires some
specific knowledge).

However, what you did not say is that once you know what you are
doing, tweaking Linux to use minimum system resources is much more
doable than MacOS or Win.

> 4/ Using Linux allows for a different approach to working with hardware, if
> you are interested in using hardware to give a tactile interface to your
> music making then some approaches are more flexible using Linux, again Max
> does not run on Linux.

Well, you can interface all kinds of hardware with Win and Mac.  And
sometimes even more easily (Just yesterday I spent 2.5 hours to get
wacom Bamboo working with linux but it comes with Win and Mac drivers
out of the box).

I have just a general comment about this Max -vs- Pd thing.  They both
have shortcomings, just a different set of them.  Pros and cons of
both systems are too long to describe and often they amount to
personal preferences.  But those differences become apparent only
after you have spent some time with both and are experienced enough to
require some specific features/behaviours etc.  I dropped Max in the
late 90s in favour of Pd.  Now, some of my professional activities
require me to program with Max.  I sometimes get frustrated that Max
does not work the way Pd does.  But then, I sometimes get frustrated
that pd does not do something else the way Max does (I really wish I
could type "\" character into pd! Well, yes I can with [str to_symbol]
by sending it [92( but that's not exactly user-friendly.  And I am
beginning to like the presentation mode of Max in spite of it being so
un-pd).

With pretty GUI in Max you sacrifice performance (I cannot find the
reference now but there was a post on the cycling74 forum and a bunch
of people benchmarked Max 4.6 and Max 5 on different machines.  Max
4.6's performance was superior according to the results).  But how
relevant it is to someone who is just learning?  That also doesn't
prevent hundreds (thousands?) of Max users to build stuff, perform
etc.

You learn one, chances are you will likely stick to it in the future
because although they use the same paradigm they do not work exactly
the same.  Once you learn a bag of tricks for one it is difficult to
transpose that to the other without actually learning the new paradigm
in some depth.  If you have the luxury of time and energy, by all
means learn both, it will not hurt.  Essentially you can accomplish
the same work with both but certainly by different means.

./MiS