Pd getting interesting again
I lost interest in developments in the Pd community for a while, and stopped following the list. The same problems kept coming up, with no solutions; key external libraries were buggy difficult to get working. I also found I didn’t have time to support my own externals (I like to contribute to communities I’m involved with).
Recently things seem to be changing, and Pd is really getting me excited again. A few things seem to be catalysing this, with specific individuals moving things forward. The RJDJ project has played a big part in this, along with Peter Brinkmann and Peter Kirn pushing libpd to release. This allows Pd to be ‘embedded’ inside a larger program, and importantly, is supported on a number of mobile platforms.
Then there are recent (2010) developments in Matju Bouchard’s Gridflow (similar to Cycling 74’s Jitter), which now has nice installers for multiple platforms, and is a breeze to setup and get productive with.
I’m also interested in Chris Mccormick’s (also of RjDj fame) PyPd project, which enables easy interfacing of Python with Pd.
Also fairly recent (2009) is William Brent’s timbreID project, which provides various audio feature extraction and timbre recognition functions. The resulting system is impressive:
Additionally Pd’s GUI has been rewritten this year, bringing a number of subtle but important usability enhancements, and paving the way for future work. Changes will be available in version 0.43.
Finally, there are numerous changes to the Pd core, including improvements to data structures and bonk~.
Exciting times… just need to make some time to play with all this stuff!
