Pure Data or SuperCollider

Pick one and why.

My points:

PD: Looks fun, looks.

SC: Looks fun, text.

I'll learn both, but I just want to master, or at least know the basics, of one, before I learn the other.

What do you guys think?

coffer

Maybe helpful...

Comparison_of_audio_synthesis_environments - includes other alternatives

I know Max, which is proprietary, is a lot more well-known and also available through Ableton Live.

well, max & pd have the same dad, funky mr. miller puckette..so concepts will be somewhat interchangeable

what you could do:

get this

Theory and Techniques of Electronic Music

  Quote

The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music is a uniquely complete source of information for the computer synthesis of rich and interesting musical timbres. The theory is clearly presented in a completely general form. But in addition, examples of how to synthesize each theoretical aspect are presented in the Pd language so the reader of the book can immediately use the theory for his musical purposes. I know of no other book which combines theory and technique so usefully.

http://crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/techniques/latest/book-html/

and that

Pd-extended

  Quote

Pd-extended is built to be an easy-to-install and thorough assembly of available libraries, extensions, and documentation.

http://puredata.info/downloads/pd-extended


and start patching away. it's quite fun..

what do you want to be able to do in the end?

if all you want to do is create sound processors for your personal enjoyment, any of the tools mentioned will do.

probably best to dabble in a variety of them before deciding to "master" any one specific.

Personally, i really fucking hate the PD UI. It is completely misanthropic imo. Max is much better UI-wise, but still I get really angry and suffer convulsions from using it. This mouse-clicky patchy bullshit and me, we just don't gel. Plugging virtual cables may be fine for the audio flow stuff, but for general logic, I want to smash a face just from thinking about using PD for even basic trigonometry. The lack of proper keyboard control is the topping on this cake of poop. See, I got angry from typing these last few lines of text. See what PD has done to me?

So I'm writing this to say, maybe max-style patching is not for you either, because you might be a person who wants to make proper stuff instead of fighting a terrible system in order to create a convoluted set of entangled virtual cables.

So I'd advise to definitely take the time and look at SuperCollider, as it's more like "proper programming", which makes working with more sophisticated logic much more better.

Then, if you have the plan to make something which runs on a smartphone or tablet instead of your desktop computer, you can safely ignore these audio programming environments alltogether. It's possible to use PD on iOS and Android, but, DON'T PD.

Imo, just learn C / C++ and roll your own DSP code.

For iOS, there's this friendly library to handle all the boilerplate: http://theamazingaudioengine.com/doc/

  On 7/10/2013 at 11:20 AM, phling said:

Plugging virtual cables may be fine for the audio flow stuff, but for general logic, I want to smash a face just from thinking about using PD for even basic trigonometry.

Boy, do I hear you. I've been coming at PD from Reaktor and my first thought was "not this shit again" because I'm already so sick of dragging little number boxes and operator boxes around and clicking to connect them.

However on the bright side PD now has Lua so you can embed text scripts, for control rate stuff anyhow. And of course you can develop your own objects in C. Also you can type math expressions like trig right in the expr object.

Where Supercollider falls down IMHO is the licensing. It's GPL whereas PD is BSD-ish. And that's the reason, I think, that interesting work based on PDlib is showing up on mobile platforms and SC isn't. So I figure if you might want to monetize your work eventually then PD is the thing.

You could also look into VST development with more traditional programming languages. Once you've got everything set-up it seems to me like that would be quite useful and fun.

Better go Supercollider IMO. Read THIS article. I couldn't said it better. It's SC vs Max story but Max and PD are practically the same thing anyway.

If you decide to go with SC buy THIS book and print THIS out.

  On 7/10/2013 at 6:37 AM, joshuatx said:

 

 

I know Max, which is proprietary, is a lot more well-known and also available through Ableton Live.

Supercollider also over max4live. http://music.columbia.edu/~brad/sc3~/

That's something Max & pd are good for, interfacing. Other than that I'm beginning to realize Phling's point about not being able to write a couple lines of code is the reason I never got anything remotely interesting out of pd.

  On 7/10/2013 at 11:20 AM, phling said:

what do you want to be able to do in the end?

Yeah, this.

As everyone is saying, patching environments are best for audio signal flow stuff, and real programming environments are best for like, programming "logic".

I am a Reaktor user, but I agree with the general gist of the thread… complex logic is a pain to do in a patching environment.

That said, if you WANT to do something like weirdo fx units or a giant modular synth of your own design, patching is the bom. But if you want to do stuff with some controllerish intelligence, it's probably easier to express that kind of stuff in actual code.

http://web.archive.org/web/20130315072805/http://crca.ucsd.edu/~jsarlo/pdvst/

You will probably save yourself a bunch of carpel tunnel syndrome going to supercollider.. I don't know how to code in it but its arguably faster to type everything out in lines than it is to point, drag and click. I am definitely going to check out that auto patch-cord macro that was posted on PD group a while back.

PD also looks like shit (I'm ok with this) and getting past the prototype stages for your stuff can be messy at the best of times, but the visual-spatial flow and the stripped down look of it works for me best.

Wow, I see what you mean about the carpal tunnel thing. Whipped up some LP5-esque FM craziness in no time and I hardly know what I'm doing yet.

Max