it's a VST, AudioUnit and also Standalone app that features a new gui for Puredata and a bunch of built-in externals. it has Cyclone and ELSE which give you a lot of Max/MSP-like power
it also has a cute keyboard object and is themeable and looks great. it has wiggly wires.
standalone it's already great, just to have a slightly nicer experience when building patches (being able to drag to resize things for instance). but... it presents itself as a VST3, LV2 and an AudioUnit too! so it can take the place of Max4Live in audio software other than Live (like Bitwig, Logic Pro, Audacity!)
my initial plan was to use puredata to prototype things, (get the audio flow and UX just right), and then port them to something like Faust and use that to compile them for, like, the teensy audio library, VSTs, microcontrollers, etc
but then i noticed on the webpage for the Pisound (a cute stereo-in stereo-out audio interface for the raspberry pi) that they have a feature where if you plug in a USB stick containing a Pd patch called main.pd and then press The Button it will start that Pd patch running
so now i have a whole new plan!
raspberry pi
uninterruptible power supply
pisound
velcro this collection of objects to my keystep
make hundreds of individually labeled 1mb flash drives each containing a single Puredata patch
it will be me, reaching into a bag of sticks and pulling out the flash labeled ✨ OVERDRIVE ✨
right now my code is on GitHub and mirrored at SourceHut. i hate both of these
websites, lol. but maybe it would be a waste of time to self host my code
again... the moment federated source forges exist, i will self host again. got
my eye on friendsforge, forge-fed and pagure's forgefed impl. i like pagure a
lot, think it's nice. i like the fedora project.
chee rabbits
everything i wish i knew about puredata 4 hours ago when i tried learning puredata for the 400th time in my life
i actually made a cool patch today. i've tried so many times before and never gotten anywhere.
puredata very alarming when you open it. when you open it, it opens a log window and nothing else
then you press cmd+n to create a new patch and you have an empty window and no information about how to go on from here lol
the put menu. these are your things
most of what i do is press cmd+1 and then type something in the box.
cmd+1 inserts an object. the idea of objects is to be kind of like a visual version of the unix command line. you insert an object and then type the name of the command, and maybe some arguments.
things that end in ~ generally are to do with audio, and things that doesn't are to do with numbers. there is a difference between "signal" and "control". signal is continuous, control is not. ~ means a signal.
the help menu
the help menu contains a couple useful items. "Pd Help" opens up the docs. chapter 2 of the docs is very helpful, though i initially just skimmed it and then went back for details when i had a better understanding of what i didn't understand.
Browser...
the other useful thing is Browser… if you open that up and select the Pure Data/ section at the top there are all these examples
context menu
osc~ docs
if you are looking at a sketch, and you see a control you don't know you can right click it and select Help and it will open a puredata patch explaining itself to you showing you what the inputs mean and what the args do
midi synth
it's also worth creating this example patch from the docs which will give you a midi synth that plays a sine wave forever out your speakers, just to get a feel for how things fit together
