Pure Data Computer Music System New Software Download

The Pure Data (short Pd) project on SourceForge unifies the extensions (or externals) written for the Pure Data Graphical Computer Music System written by Miller Puckette with contributions from many others.

A new software system, called Pure Data, is in the early stages of development. Its design attempts to remedy some of the deficiencies of the Max program while preserving its strengths. The most important weakness of Max is the difficulty of maintaining compound data structures of the type that might arise when analyzing and resynthesizing sounds or when recording and modifying sequences of events of many different types. Also, it has proved hard to integrate non-audio signals (video, for instance, and also audio spectra) into Max's rigid "tilde object" system. Finally, the whole issue of maintaining two separate copies of all data structures (one to edit and one to access in real time) has caused much confusion and difficulty. Pd's working prototype attempts to simplify the data structures in Max to make them more readily combined into novel user-defined data structures. Also, the relationship between the graphical process and the real-time one (which is handled in one way on the Macintosh and another way on the ISPW) is replaced by yet a third solution.

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The design of real-time computer music systems has been a subject of active research since the RTSKED program [1]. By 1986
several authors were proposing formal or semi-formal real-time protocols, sometimes in the guise of complete    systems for doing real-time computer music [2], [3]. The question of

making software systems which were really usable by non-computer scientists was addressed by the Max program [4]. Max was an attempt to make a screen-based patching language that could imitate the modalities of a patchable analog synthesizer. Many other graphical "patching languages" had been proposed that did not sufficiently address the realtime control aspect; and many other researchers had by then proposed much more sophisticated real-time control strategies without presenting a clear and funto-use graphical interface; Max was in essence a compromise that got part way toward both goals.

As soon as Philippe Manoury's Pluton was realized using Max (thus proving Max to be an interesting environment for real-time computer music), a stream of criticisms of Max started to appear. Max wasn't originally intended as a programming language; yet many users treated it as one. As such Max had obvious shortcomings, some of which are reported in [5]. Also, the original version of Max, being written for a Mac Plus computer, didn't address the question of computer-generated audio, remaining instead in the realm of MIDI. This was addressed in [6], but only for special hardware.

The question of how to use Max to amass and use data arose in IRCAM during the design phase of the ISPW. A new software idea, called Animal, was proposed and implemented [7]. Many ideas in Pd owe their origin to the Animal program.



See the Downloads section for installer and a plain zip file.