Posts Tagged ‘pdpedia’

An adventure in Wubi

{ Sep 21, 2008 @ 4:16 pm } · { Generative Music, Pure Data }
{ Tags: , , , , , } · { Leave a Comment }

I’ve been learning ActionScript 3 lately. It looks like Flash 10 (Astro)will have some interesting new support for doing sound synthesis that should be an improvement over the current hacks using the BitmapData class, so I’ll be on the lookout for that. At this point, I haven’t had a lot of time to work on any generative music algorithms in Flash, but I’m hoping that will change soon.

It seems that the wikified documentation for Pd objects that I posted about long ago, Pdpedia, may have never gotten very far off the ground. I believe I stumbled across it months ago, but now I can elicit nothing but an error from the staging server. Maybe this is a temporary situation. If you know otherwise, feel free to enlighten me.

I’ve been wanting to install Linux for some time, especially since I was a bit frustrated with the incomplete state of the SuperCollider port for Windows (Psycollider). I also just enjoy playing with Linux; I keep a headless web dev sever running Debian, but I have used Linux little on the desktop, at least for the last several years. The problem was that I had no free partitions on my desktop’s HD, and I didn’t want to resize any existing NTFS partitions. Then I found Wubi, which will install Ubuntu using a file on a Windows drive as its filesystem. This was remarkably easy, once I downloaded the Ubuntu ISO for the amd64 platform and dropped it in the same folder as the Wubi installer.

Once I had Ubuntu configured reasonably well, I started installing packages from the Ubuntu Studio project.

I’m still waiting for that to download and install, but I found that there is a port of the SuperCollider server for AMD64 in the form of a debian package. I have a wedding to attend today, but I’ll be installing that tonight. Hopefully I can get all the bells and whistles working, and perhaps play with puredata, Chuck, or Csound, too.

PdPedia online

{ Oct 2, 2007 @ 6:43 pm } · { Documentation, Pure Data }
{ Tags: , , } · { Comments (1) }

Something that should be a boon to new and intermediate Pure Data users, a wiki of Pd objects is now up.

Marius Schebella on the Pd mailing list:

At the moment we still use the address http://wiki.puredata.info, but it
should be http://www.pdpedia.org in the next [few] days/weeks. (At the moment, pdpedia.org is linked to a test site.)
The general idea of the project is to have better documentation of Pd, mainly – but not only – its object classes. I hope it will become a useful tool to search for objects and how to do things in Pd. The search field should really work as a “how do I…”
All objects have some basic information like a short description, library, categories, but we also dumped text that we found in the
help patches to give a little help for filling in content. That is the goal, to get many people involved in sharing knowledge about how to use the objects, document features, and so on.

So far, the documentation for Pd is not nearly as bad as I was warned it would be. I think the PdPedia is a great idea — all the core and extension objects documented in one comprehensive resource. The self-documentation of the program (Help patches) is quite informative, as well.

One quirk I’ve noticed is that both the mailing list and the main documentation wiki are both heavy with Quebecois. I’m glad that some of the documentation appears in French, but this also accounts for some seriously poor and distracting English in those pages, as well as some documents being impenetrable to someone who can scarcely order soup in French.

I have no explanation for this prominent Francophone Canadian presence. Interesting curiosity I suppose, though I’m still left wondering why the userbase is concentrated there. Perhaps its just a vocal Quebecois minority.

I keep forgetting to check the Cycling ’74 docs and tutorials for Max, which I have heard are largely applicable to Pd.

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