I’m really interested in working with a new modular music programming language/environment thingy. I do not want to use Reaktor due to the fact that I own a license for this program but I can’t use it because I bought a new computer and getting it installed and registered on my new pc and off of my old one has been the most retarted-bigass-headache bs ever (and now I really hate Native Instruments). But I would like to work with a similar program. I have been thinking about Csound, Pure Data, Supercollider, and Audiomulch. Max/MSP would be great, but I simply do not have the cash for that right now. Anywho, of what I’ve read Csound seems very powerful but really complicated. I don’t know any C coding, but I do know some basic Java coding. And the other options I don’t really know much enough about either. I know Pure Data is similar to Max/MSP, but that’s about it. Which would be the best to go with? I want the program for sound design and really esoteric dsp.
csound is really fun to play with, but it has a pretty significant learning curve at first. check out steven yi’s blue project for a nice, sequencer-acting frontend to csound that’s pretty easy to work with.
I’ve been playing around the PureData here and there for a few weeks now and I really like it. It’s not too hard to learn and it comes with a ton of tutorial patches. I tried the Max/MSP demo last week and didn’t like it nearly as much as PureData.
I’ve also played around with ChucK. It’s pretty easy to use but prefer the Pd boxes over a text programming language for music stuff.
Sounds cool, I’ll look in to it.
i’m doing the same but came to the opposite conclusion. what did you prefer about PD over max? beyond the price obviously…
I’ve personally tried 3 things: PureData, SuperCollider and ChucK
puredata :
the box’n’wires approach definitely makes it easy to grasp. But your patch will quickly turn to a mess unless you tidy things up properly.
SuperCollider :
super-powerful, big userbase, tons of extensions.
But it’s a bit hard to grasp, there are some inconsistencies within the official libraries, and I find the language horrible
chuck :
very interesting approach, I found it easier to learn than supercollider. Declaring the time explicitely in your programming is a great concept (it allows you to unify audio signal, control signal and sequencing). unfortunately, the libraries contain much less stuff than the other two.
PD, SC3 and ChucK=> are all great. If you use OSX SC3 is really awesome. The linux version works but the experience is more suited toward OSX. SC3’s win32 version is okay for learning things, though it is much harder to work with than the linux version with emacs. OSX is certainly without a doubt the intended platform for SuperCollider, PD is certainly Linux friendly overall and ChucK I can’t really make an assumption on, as I haven’t spent much time with it other than running some examples with win32, but I think it could be the most platform independent of the 3, basing this on the way ChucK works overall.
There are some others in the free realm I am not really aware of, so I can’t really comment on them.
pd on Win also lets you make VSTs for use in renoise with this: http://crca.ucsd.edu/~jsarlo/pdvst/
I mostly use it to send OSC from renoise at the moment.
Part of it was probably that I started using Pd first. I already knew all of the short cuts to lay down the atom types and I found opening the palette in Max/MSP every time a little annoying (although I’m sure there is a way around it). I also kind of felt like the fancy graphical things just slowed it down. In the few hours I used it, Max/MSP crashed a few times.
If any of you are students Cycling '74 offers a student discount. I think you can get Max/MSP/Jitter for $250 instead of $750 or whatever the whole package costs.
Now that’s awesome!
PD is fantastic but it is very difficult to create a nice GUI. Max/Msp has come a long way with that. In previous versions they just had the “bpatcher” which was great, and now they have added a “presentation mode”… Basically you select what you want to see, put it in presentation mode, and move your objects…and this has no effect on the structure of your original object ordering. And to top it off, you can use that within a bpatcher.
–basic
–more advanced/confusing
All that makes it really easy to reuse what you make, and it’s pretty. I will add though, i have learned a lot from the PD tutorials, and there’s a great free book online called “loadbang” i’m pretty sure.