Starting a Pure Data Wiki (Database/Examples Collection)

beem

Not really Off Topic but anyway...
Is it time for a real, neat, fully functioning Pure Data Wiki ?
It could be useful to have a place to collect patches or links to Pure Data examples, use them to illustrate different synthesis techniques, or applications of PD and so on. Some of the threads on this forum provide a good overview of subjects like reverb, granular synthesis or handling midi polyphony and it would be great to be able to summarize what's been worked out here and put it into a neat form somewhere.
Does this exist already somewhere? Would people be interested in contributing to something like this? Would it be useful?

beem

Just to give an idea of the kind of resource I'm talking about; here is a rough version of the kind of entry that I can put together just using my bookmarks. Nothing too technical, just a collection of useful stuff put together in one place.

Reverb

Reverberation (or reverb) is the effect generated by many copies of a sound with different delays summing together due to reflections off the boundaries of a space. In contrast to echo, the individual copies are not distinguishable but overall effect typically makes the sound richer or fuller.

Pure Data Vanilla comes with three reverb examples in the extras; in Help>Browser they should appear under ‘Externals’.

freeverb~ is a PD external offering ‘studio-quality Schroeder/Moorer reverb’
https://puredata.info/downloads/freeverb
(example usage: https://guitarextended.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/reverb-effect-in-pure-data/)

Examples:

Tom Erbe’s reverb patches
(allpass, Schroeder, Moorer, Moore, Gerzon/Stautner/Puckett, Dattorro)
http://tre.ucsd.edu/wordpress/?p=625
Choucroute FX by coloscope
https://patchstorage.com/la_choucroute_fx/
Tremolo/reverb effect : “harmonic tremolo” found in early 1960s amps.
282~ reverb (Ursa Major SST-282) by acreil / whale-av
https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/uploads/files/1516212572597-working.zip
Freeverb Vanilla
https://github.com/derekxkwan/pd-vfreeverb
Derekxkwan’s cleanup of Katja Vetter's Pd-vanilla freeverb abstraction
ELSE library
https://github.com/porres/pd-else
Contains [mono.rev~], [stereo.rev~], [echo.rev~], [giga.rev~], [free.rev~]

PD Forum discussion of the subject: https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/11622/reverberation

Further reading:
https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/springs-plates-buckets-physical-modelling
Sound on Sound ‘Synth Secrets’ article on Reverb

See also: Delay/Echo, Resonators, Convolution

solipp

github/gitlab is actually well suited for something like this. You could simply create a readme like this: https://github.com/olilarkin/awesome-musicdsp or this: https://github.com/nodiscc/awesome-linuxaudio. Others can contribute, create issues etc.

EEight

and I could easily embed (using a iframe) the wiki in the forum (adding a icon in the menu opening the page, something like what we did for: https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/dataflow)

lacuna

some thoughts

A wiki could be another democratic resource.
There are already many different resources to learn PD, easy to find, online and offline.
PD has nothing to do with consumerism, imho. This is neither Eurorack nor VST. It is more about ideas than downloading existing tools. PD is a development environment, something like a blank paper. Very individual. Apart from learning the language, there is no right or wrong.
You can do much more apart from DSP with it. Many users are artists, not musicians. An encyclopedia would never be complete and feels like a strange perspective because archiving, in the sense of writing down what others did, might not be the very base of creation.
Yes, PD is ideal for designing a kick-drum and although its purpose is free, PD and many power users are more in the tradition of IRCAM and similar.
As the PD community is small and methods and techniques aren't PD specific, a wiki on DSP in general with sub-forums and sub-sections or tags in each article for code examples in pseudocode, C, Python, Matlab, PD, Max, SC, VCV ect. could connect many more people and would make more sense imho.
There is already the big Wikipedia with DSP and software programming, too. Rewriting everything would be pointless. But links to examples in different coding-languages are rare.
It might make more sense to use a wiki as some kind of meta resource of weblinks.
For example, your list of reverb techniques is lacking a lot and the introduction is misinformation, as it describes vaguely only one specific way of many in creating a reverb.
If this would be a wiki page, it would require many more contributions for becoming more useful than an online search. And as others said before, I doubt this is going to happen if PD only.
Much more important to me would be making a backup of this forum.
It is an important resource and it would be pity if it would be gone. This happened to many forums for different reasons before and all their information will be gone forever.
Even a frozen mirror of the current state, saved on some free and independent server would be better than nothing. Even plain .txt and .pd files could help, if it's not trivial to run the forum as a backup.
It would be much harder to learn PD without this forum. For example, I guess almost everyone trips over the [$0-in_a_message_is_not_working( and such things.

EEight

@lacuna said:

Much more important to me would be making a backup of this forum.

We have backup, but yes I agree that we need to mirror it (what if I die). Like I said it would be a good time to upgrade the solution (nodebb) - there is a bug with this forum (eating all the cpu). I wish I had more time, very difficult these days.

Boran Robert

@beem The idea to have everything organized in a more advance fashion is good, but to be honest the cost of maintaining such a system is time consuming and needs a very active community. A lot of users who are new to PD just want quick access to hard work material that takes huge amount of time and knowledge to make, without spending time to learn it. So by making the process of getting various patches more easy will not encourage learning. This trend of having everything "at you fingernail" without work, reading or curiosity is like a modern fancy software interface that looks good but lacks serious software engineering principles. I also think that a serious backup of this forum is a smart move in order to keep years of hard work intact. The material of this forum contains years of hard work, devotion, passion, shared by very special people and it will be a great lost if we don't preserve it in a form or another.

ingox

@Boran-Robert Something will always be available: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/

Boran Robert

@ingox Good.

lordgreekfolder

It seems to me that part of the issue is how disconnected all the various PD communities are.

There's the mailing-list which has its regulars,
There's the Discord and the community there.
There's this site.
There's all the users who put their stuff on puredata.info.
There's the subreddit.
I didn't even know there was an IRC.

I haunt all of those places (except the IRC), and while I know there are others who also spend time in each, I also know that there are folks who really just stick to one or two.

I think there are more than enough PD users to make and maintain a wiki, but I don't think there are enough PD users in any one single place to actually achieve it. This strikes me as being one of the major things that holds PD back.

Take, for example, the Monome community over at lines. That community is small in terms of raw users, its centered around really esoteric and expensive gear, but its also absolutely thriving because they're not dispersed across 6 different platforms.

I don't know. I guess I wish the PD community had a more obvious center to it. And a wiki would work only if it were located at/near that center. But damn, I really want it. I think it's an amazing idea and it would solve some serious shortcomings.

ingox

@lordgreekfolder Here is an overview: https://puredata.info/community.

Isn't puredata.info already a wiki?

lordgreekfolder

@ingox thanks, I didn't know about that page.

I guess what I meant though is that compared to something like SuperCollider or Monome, PD seems to be fractured into many distinct communities. It's great that that page exists with all those resources, and it's also great to have so many different options for people's different preferences. But I sometimes wonder what could happen if, for example, everyone on the PD mailing list also hung out on this forum. When you have a community dispersed into so many smaller pieces, I think there are bad side effects. Like, for example, certain knowledge or sets of expertise that are well-represented in one area, like the Discord server, but not in another, like the IRC.

It seems like, especially if you're new to PD, that this can be a major hindrance.

ingox

@lordgreekfolder Ok, if you start a wiki i provide some patches or something

whale-av

@ingox So, how is it going to work?
Someone needs to work out a hierarchy and format with appropriate page titles.
Permissions will be needed to keep it under control.
I think it will need to be quite constrained or it will just become a parallel of this forum.
It will need to be kept very tight.
References at the bottom for useful follow-up like in Wikepedia, but restricted concise information for each page or it will run out of control.
Any links will have to lead to a concise sensible page too......... not a discussion.

I would suggest starting with all known Pd objects, especially as the documentation is already mostly done in their help files.... that currently you only get to see once you have created the object....... that you might not know exists.
So maybe the same hierarchy as Pd..... math, audio, audio math, gui, ..... as in help-intro.pd... ?
But the elephant in the room is the tilde~. A wiki which doesn't use it as a Boolean operator?
David.

tabache

Hi,
I'm studying PD from about 1 month. I'm projecting a part of my new live setup with PD, therefore I think i will stay here for a long time

I was just thinking how could be useful to have a wiki for pure data, so I'm pleasantly surprised to find this thread!
I must say that, to find information, I have found myself confused several times with the various platforms of Pure Data!
So I think a wiki can be a great connector and glue.

Each person will be able to contribute, and I believe that a structure of this kind has a great potential.

For example, in these days I felt the need to have a manual for the entire external librarys, to be able to easily browse what's inside all that. Currently it seems to me that there is none of this on the web. Also here, the wiki could be very powerful (for a section dedicated to externals/deken, I would be happy to work on it).

I think that initially it is good to leave registrations open to contribute, to encourage people to help (but certainly in the future, you can always change). I have seen many wikis work fine with open registrations.

So, does anyone have an idea for a server that we could use and try to start?
I believe this pandemic period could be perfect for starting this project!

p.s. there are other PD communities not mentioned by @lordgreekfolder , like Facebook (really big) and Telegram.

beem

Thanks for all the replies to this. It's taken me a while to understand the various responses I got to this idea but it's gradually become a bit clearer. It seems that there are actually several possible Pd wikis that could be made or combined:

A wiki of Pd objects - a sort of in-depth illustrated help with tips and examples for every object and external

A wiki of Pd methods and applications - how to use Pd; e.g. handling midi, random functions, FFT, etc

A wiki of Pd resources, links, and examples - a guide to what is available online, Pd tutorials, instruments - a kind of collective annotated bookmarks collection

The last one is what I personally had in mind initially and I have my own version here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tzS2KU8x31JXoUxmkEr5WikJvxcrgHa4C0vM8LBw49Q/edit?usp=sharing

which anyone is welcome to join in on. It's currently a bit of a mess and not sorted into any real system. I understand from certain replies that some people don't think it's a good idea to make access to other people's work too easy but I think the more fun you have with Pd, without having to learn everything the hard way, the better.

lordgreekfolder

@beem I love it. This is amazing! I have so many scattered bookmarks and whatnot that I'm going to sift through and add to this doc.

Thank for this.

Also, just to clarify my earlier comments: I'd like to make it clear that I love this idea completely, and if anything I said was interpreted to mean that this is a bad idea, then I apologize for that. The main thrust of my earlier comments was really to ponder what I see as the fragmented state of PD. My reasoning was this: a stronger community would lead to a stronger collaborative effort at wiki-building.

And also, a stronger community would lead to an even stronger community. This is not the thread for that conversation, though.

Cheers!

beem

@lordgreekfolder cool - well, send me a message on here or use the email on the doc and I'll make you an editor!

and I wasn't referring to your comments!

whale-av

@beem It's a very good start and already will "PD help" a lot of people.
You won't be able you use hyperlinks like a true wiki until you have control of the content though.
And that will need content storage in the wiki...... so permission to copy...... or content creation..... and a faster host.

But already it will let us use hyperinks in the forum and elsewhere to give people help with for example Pd Granular synthesis without having to scrape for links.
You should probably add the Floss manual even though it is very "extended" still.
In fact it should have a whole section on missing libraries and how to make old patches work in Vanilla...... with hyperlinks back to this forum and others.
Good work..!

whale-av

@beem Just found some excellent links on @katjav 's site....... http://www.katjaas.nl/puredata/puredata.html

Not all the links are still valid but most are.
Like this one for the Arduino and Pd...... https://playground.arduino.cc/Interfacing/PD/
David.

beem

Another sample from the work-in-progress ...
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tzS2KU8x31JXoUxmkEr5WikJvxcrgHa4C0vM8LBw49Q
I thought it would be worth having a category for these more self-contained collections

Modular Systems in Pd

ACRE
https://git.iem.at/pd/acre

ARGOPd
http://gerard.paresys.free.fr/ARGOPd/

Automatonism
https://www.automatonism.com/

Context
https://github.com/LGoodacre/context-sequencer
https://contextsequencer.wordpress.com/

DENSO
https://www.d-e-n-s-o.org/pure

DIY
http://pdpatchrepo.info/patches/patch/76

Kraken - Virtual Guitar Effects Pedal Board
https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/11999/kraken-a-low-cpu-compact-highly-versatile-guitar-effects-stompbox

LWM Rack
http://lwmmusic.com/software-lwmrack.html

La Malinette
http://malinette.info/en/#home
Open toolkit for hardware and software interactive art-making systems

Mandril Boxes
http://musa.poperbu.net/index.php/puredata-mainmenu-50#mandril

Metastudio
http://www.sharktracks.co.uk/html/software.html