Re: [microsound] Max/MSP for Windows

[Michal Seta <mis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Joshua R Davison wrote:

> nope.  the extra dough is for a better looking gui and thorough
> documentation.

is PD documentation that deficient?

>
> i forget if pd has the option-click help files, but that's a big deal
> for me with max/msp.

Right button->select 'Help', in Mac OS X it's prolly option-click.

> see how the other
> half lives, and then you can go on feeling all superior for having a
> great tool at 0% of the cost.

I have used max/msp for quite some time and honestly there are certain 
features that I have initially missed.  I don't think, however, that those 
features were essential although some of them would be very welcome in PD 
(and I supposed they will get implemented sooner or later).  PD _is_ an 
alternative to Max/MSP.  It might be tricky to move from Max/MSP to PD and 
give up on some of the UI enhancements (although, there are many advantages 
to open source software, not only ideological but also practical) but for 
someone completely new to this kind of software PD will do just fine.  I 
cannot think of a process/instrument that can be done with MSP and cannot 
with PD.  The implementations will be different, they will look different but 
they will behave in the same way.

BTW, PD is not written in tcl.  It uses tk as its GUI toolkit but there are 
alernatives.  See http://crca.ucsd.edu/~jsarlo/gripd/#screenshots for a 
wxWindows based GUI.  It could enhance the frontend of your patches.  
Otherwise, the audio/midi is written in C.

Also, PD could could be scripted with Python, Ruby, Scheme and Tcl which could 
give you access to many other GUI bindings (native MacOS, Windows, QT, Motif, 
etc) but, of course, this requires a little more work.  Moreover, PD can be 
run without any gui and thus save precious CPU cycles for pure processing.

Perhaps I should shut up now, before a new software war begins.

-- ./MiS
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