Hello all!

I'm super new to puredata and could you use some help figuring out a project. Even just point me in the direction of a good tutorial!

I have a MIDI device connected to my computer. I want pd to display a specific PNG image each time it receives a pitch value from the MIDI device. For example, when it receives a pitch input of 50, the computer should display the corresponding filename.png. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get it to do something like this.

Eventually I would like these png images to print on a thermal receipt printer but I'm getting ahead of myself, at the moment I just want to figure out that first step.

If there are any ideas for how to do this, or even any tutorials you recommend I watch to get this going, that would be amazing!

Thanks in advance!!

here's something to get you started.. you will need to get the 'else' library for the [else/pic] object
testpng.pd
if you put an "images" folder in the same folder as the patch and put .pngs in it the file names will be loaded into the [list store] when the patch opens. Then when you play midi notes they get stripped of their note-offs and used to look up the nth element in the list, which is used to load the image into [else/pic]
of course, you need to put 128 images in to cover the range of midi notes. otherwise you might want to use [clip] or some other math objects to get the notes into the range starting at 0.

if you want to see the values at any point in the data flow a good object to use is [print] which will show the input value in the console

Aside from the stuff in pd's included help, else also comes with a tutorial.

@seb-harmonik.ar said:

testpng.pd

Hi, a perhaps trivial question:
in [file patchpath] how should the path be written?
I've tried various combinations, but it stays dotted.

The patch and the "Images" folder are in:
/home/j/pd24

[pd 0.52.1 on Linux]
Thank you,
a.

@atux 0.52 does not have [file patchpath], introduced with 0.54,

@oid said:

0.54,

I had tried pd 0.54, but it doesn't have the jack option in Media menu (or at least I didn't find it).
For this reason I use 0.52.1.

How can I modify the patch for use it in pd 0.52.1?

Thank you,
a.

@atux Most likely who ever packaged pd for your distro did not include Jack, My bet would be that your distro has adopted PipeWire and there are still some bugs in the packaging process regarding it, maintainer made a faulty assumption or the distro does not understand Jack and how PipeWire works with it. If you have not tried 0.54 recently it could be worth giving it another try, they may have fixed it and a good amount of fun new stuff has been added since 0.52 like multichannel audio objects, many new methods for [file]. If they have not fixed it I think this would be worthy of a bug report. But worst comes to worst, pd is very easy to build from source.

To make it work with 52.1 you can just set the path, remove [file patchpath] and connect the [loadbang] directly to the [symbol $1/images/*( message and replace the $1 with the path. Or you can use [openpanel] to select your path, replace [loadbang] with a [bng] and [file patchpath] with [openpanel].

@oid said:

connect the [loadbang] directly to the [symbol $1/images/*(

In /home/j/pd24 there is the patch.
In /home/j/pd24/images I put an image called 60.png

I connected my MIDI keyboard to pd 0.52.1 and played the C note (which corresponds to MIDI pitch 60), as can be seen from the number box I placed:

Should the 60.png file open?
Nothing happens and in the pd console it writes:

bad arguments for message 'open' to object 'pic'

I had already installed the else library and the relative paths had also been inserted correctly in pd. What does that question mark represent in the patch?
Any tips?

[pd .52.1 on Linux]
Thank you,
a.

@atux midi note 60 will select the 61st image in the folder (usually sorted alphabetically)
so you either have to add more pictures or subtract 60 before [get $1(

edit: actually I wouldn't expect an out of range index to [list store] to trigger anything..

you can install [else] using "find externals" - from there you can use [else/pic] (I put [else/ in front because it saves having to add settings to find else)

I took the [else/knob] also included in else and made it put out discrete values from 00 to 78 which get changed from 0, 1, 2, to 00, 01, 02, for the way I have them named - and mapped to a sequence (if you like I can post the imagemagik terminal command I cobbled to do that from a website online that has free VST looking UI)
if you changed the sequence to three (like 001 002) just change the makefilename from 2 to 3
knobanimationExample.zip

right click on the [else/pic] to look at the help, it only opens certain types of files like bmp and gif

@fishcrystals It worked with .PNG files for me

@oid said:

pd is very easy to build from source

I managed to build pd 0.54.0 from sources:

./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-jack
make
sudo make install

As you can see, I solved the missing jack issue by adding: --enable-jack
Now jack is listed in Media menu, it works fine.

Bye,
a.