[PD] FLOSS book Lists chapter

Andy Farnell padawan12 at obiwannabe.co.uk
Wed Feb 16 10:23:47 CET 2011


On Tue, 15 Feb 2011 13:19:35 -0500 (EST)
Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca> wrote:


> The idea of Vanilla-without-externals is probably most useful to ZenGarden 
> users, who can't compile any existing externals, because ZenGarden was 
> designed to be incompatible with Pd-Vanilla. It is because of this 
> incompatibility, that Zengarden users are led to excessively focus on 
> what's compatible with Vanilla-without-Externals, because that's all that 
> the ZenGarden project aims to support.
> 
> Just another hypothesis. What do you think ?

I think you're right. This minimal set of features is designed from
the outset. Martin and I spent some afternoons in the park 
discussing the idea of an axiomatic set of DSP operations, from 
which all other patches can be built. He was quite clear on that as 
a goal from the start. The sensitivity of sound to small changes in
implementation has been on my mind from the start, so if you like
the emphasis was on a reliably portable functional equivalence 
without code compatability. I have always taken this, perhaps 
presumptuously, as one of Miller's strong principles. Without it 
the slogan "The diagram is the program" fails, and one cannot use Pd 
to write books, teach or otherwise share datafow programs in a purely 
visual way. The commercial advantages too, as the RjDj project
benefitted from and upheld, are ease of maintenance and widespread
compatability across diverse hardware.

Pd-Extended and the ecology of externals is an overlapping
but different space, marvelous in its own ways, but for projects
like defining a portable markup standard for reactive music, or
creating a new standard "middle layer" in game audio, then the
more robust and limited the basic unit gen set is the better.

Andy

-- 
Andy Farnell <padawan12 at obiwannabe.co.uk>



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