And I should point out that I personally feel kinda guilty... I met Miller Puckette and he was so enthusiastic about PureData and how much more the community could grow. I realize the biggest reason Max is thriving is because of marketing and now integration with Ableton.
I feel like if something were done to prevent Pd from being wiped off the map we could have had an open source community by now rather than Cycling 74. hm.... the media production world is complicated for open source tho.
> I feel like if something were done to prevent Pd from being wiped off the map we could have had an open source community by now rather than Cycling 74.
But we got another repeat of the scenario: the OSS project was unable to muster decent UI while the commercial variant was able to both fund the staff and draw out the needs from its user community to make continual UI improvements. (Speaking specifically to the vast improvements over time culminating in Max 6.) If I sound a bit testy here, it's because I've seen too many promising OSS projects killed by this same problem: terrible user experience.
> I realize the biggest reason Max is thriving is because of marketing
I strenuously disagree. It's because PD absolutely failed to deliver a sane user experience, period. Sure, marketing is important, but Cycling '74's work is what makes Max at all relevant today. About all that PD ever had going for it versus Max was being open source.
As someone who used Max/FTS back on the ISPW[1], even that old UI was vastly better than PD's. I enthusiastically gave PD a go when it first came out, even going back from time to time to check in on it. Every time I found it nigh unusable due to huge UI issues. Especially for what amounts to a visual programming language, this is the death knell. For comparison, it's not like early ISPW Max didn't have its pain points.
Max users owe Miller Puckette a substantial debt for his contributions to this excellent visual signal/event programming environment, so it's unfortunate that PD was never able to pull it together.
yeahhhh i mean i guess part of the "guilt" i was expressing is a regret that I was too young/inexperienced to be able to contribute and I too just handed money over to Max/MSP when they were still on version 4, which IIRC was not very different from Pd at the time.
I think when Max 5 introduced "Presentation Mode" I knew it was over, and then Max for Live was the nail in the coffin, but prior to that I'd seen most students using Max because they believed it was more feature-rich even though most of our professors were using Pd to do more complex work than my Max-toting peers. Similar to Matlab/Octave... I've seen a few Octave users outpacing Matlab users simply because they were free to experiment without having the roadblocks of toolkit purchases.
Cycling 74 has done a good job over time for sure I'm just saying that as recently as 5-10 years ago there wasn't such a clear dichotomy, and the release of Max for Live really struck me because it was a proprietary integration, huge departure from pluggo's VST philosophy.
I think I just have to get used to the fact that despite the great work being done on projects like Pd/Jack/Ardour, audio technology is probably drifting further away from OSS than towards it
It's tough, I want to contribute to to some audio projects but most of the ones that are gaining traction seem to be putting up paywalls or are too rooted in platform-specific code. I'm toying with some audio stuff on the JVM, will see how that goes....
There's a reasonably active community around PD, but it has the same problem as a lot of other open source software - it's hideously ugly. IIRC the user interface is done with TCL/TK. Given the large number of competing products in the same space, people who are not heavily committed to open source have little incentive to use it, unfortunately. I'd say a visual/UI makeover is a higher priority right now than extending the PD library or other tasks.
PD and Max-MSP are from the same stable, and PD is the poor man's Max-MSP. I feel that PD is an excellent learning tool if you want to learn about synthesis or DSP more generally, but as a musician's tool it's just not ready. A lot of the music made with PD is pure crap, or even a type of anti-music, or puts forward some kind of alternate musical theory of its own which nobody can understand. PD music is usually too detached from normal conventions such as 12 TET, harmonies and progressions to be listenable. Typically the PD user will produce something with weird bell sounds, stuttering percussive noises or massive pad washes going in and out. Not conventional music. The reason is that PD doesn't provide enough built-in function shortcuts. If you want to make music, PD is a practically useless interface. By the time you've programmed a very basic synth, any inspiration has long gone. An instrument is something that should need no foreplay beyond just turning it on and picking it up, before actually playing it. If you want to make something recognizable as music with PD, you will need to first download someone else's synth patch or copy a subtractive or FM synth from a book first. And then you'll find it has no patches you can modify (unless you make them yourself). The time between turning on the computer, setting up your synth and playing your piece is simply too long.
I feel like if something were done to prevent Pd from being wiped off the map we could have had an open source community by now rather than Cycling 74. hm.... the media production world is complicated for open source tho.