Hello All, I've been away from PD for a long time. Was very active in the early to mid 2000's but was focused at that time on creating visuals. Coming back to PD now for audio and wondering if anyone can point me to tutorials about having PD send/receive midi with a DAW. I'd like this for algorithmic composition in PD sent to the DAW as well as perhaps to have PD receive and process midi data from the DAW and send it back. I know there's probably a ton of info on this somewhere but also know how it can get outdated so here at the end of 2021, I'm wondering if anyone can recommend any best methods to look into, any good tutorials, etc on this subject. I have access to PD on Linux and Windows but not mac if that matters. Thank you in advance.

Agreed. I've been playing with Camomile and have written effects plug-ins in Pd that have sent and received MIDI and/or OSC and have been controlled by DAW automation, so that's substantial integration. I defer to @emviveros regarding the support for externals since I'm just a vanilla guy. I've also written effects plug-ins with side-chains for Reaper, so that means your Pd VST patches can be modulated by audio signals from other Reaper tracks. Reaper itself supports fairly complete OSC and MIDI controls (both input and output) so that's another layer of integration that's possible. And for completeness I suppose one should mention using MIDI and audio loopback software, but the flexible MIDI and audio routing capabilities in Reaper seem to make them unnecessary.

@jameslo said:

for completeness I suppose one should mention using MIDI and audio loopback software,

@parisgraphics said:

I have access to PD on Linux

In that case Jack server is your friend. Get QjackCtl for easy setup and patching. I do such things as control pd patches from my DAW via midi through jack to PD, translate midi messages from my keyboard in PD and route them to my DAW through jack, route audio from my DAW to PD for processing and back again through jack, the possibilities are endless...

DAW's that work for these kinds of setups on linux (that I have worked with): Ardour, Qtractor, Reaper. Rosegarden - there are probably more. For the time being I prefer reaper

@jameslo said:

the flexible MIDI and audio routing capabilities in Reaper seem to make them unnecessary.

I haven't been using reaper for a more than a couple of months, but at least on linux all external routing has to be patched through jack server

You should probably take a look at https://github.com/timothyschoen/PlugData/
which is a distro of Pd that can run as a plugin inside the DAW (and comes with a unique editor/interface).

I haven't tried from DAW to PD, but LoopBe is still fine for me from PD to Reaper on Windows (worked well with Ableton too)

@parisgraphics hey there,

I'm learning Pd since this year and I have to admit that Soud Simulator's tutorials are relatively goor regardless of your OS (he uses macOS).
He made a video on sending midi note from Pd to a DAW here :

hola, existe el objeto "midiparse" con el cual logré leer archivos midi desde purr-data y tambien "midiformat" con el cual logré crearlos. saludos.

New video tutorial, ending with a section on PlugData (Pd as a VST plugin in a host).

https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/14244/video-tutorial-pd-sync-with-ableton-link-and-with-daw-plugdata

(PlugData was mentioned above... it is COOOOOOOOL, apart from issues with some external packs, it very nearly blows away all the other approaches.)

hjh

I made a simple abstraction for sending OSC data to Ardour a while back. Maybe it would be of some help to you.

https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/11728/abstraction-for-controlling-ardour-plugin-parameters

paris! we used to chat on twitter. I'm a little (couple years) late to the party but check it out - this receives midi clock from anything (including a daw but a drum machine is funner) and lets you make your own sequencers to send notes back to it, I'm just using it for drums because the metronome is a good sanity check. midiclock2sequencemididrums.pd .