I make patches that I use on both Gentoo Linux and Mac OS X. I've made do thus far without any externals (I'm using the vanilla version of Pd because Pd-extended for Mac is extremely unstable, and in the pd-overlay for Gentoo, pd-extended is also listed as being unstable).

So, my question is this: I've been trying to look at some example patches, but they tend to use objects like rand~ that I don't have. Where can I get them? Do I absolutely have to use pd-extended?

Thanks!
Jake

You can compile just the externals you want and add them into the /extra folder.

Start with a commonly used library like Cyclone and compile those objects, test them and move onto the next ones. It's time consuming, but pd-extended is HUGE and most example patches out there only really use a few objects in addition to vanilla.

Is there some sort of directory to tell me which library to use if I get messages that x, y, and z externals are missing?

Generally what I do is:

locate NameOfExternal | grep pd

which usually finds the help patch, or the source code. But then I have

svn checkout https://pure-data.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/pure-data/trunk

on my hard drive.

It is possible to patch Pd so that when it loads a library it prints out all the classes that are registered by it. I've got a hacky version compiled into one of my Pd's but it's not very useable yet (and generally you only need to run it once, then save and process the lists of objects - it's annoying having pages of printouts if you're using Pd).

EDIT: there is also: http://wiki.puredata.info/en/Main_Page but i don't know how complete it is yet

The thing is, I don't have the svn tree on my computer, and how would Pd tell me what classes are registered by a particular library if that library is missing?

don't use the newest version of pd-extended and only use hans' stable installer and you will be fine on osx at least and probably linux too.

if you don't know what i'm talking about then google 'hans pd installer' and it should be the first result.

i think the most recent stable release is 0.39.3 extended

anything newer than that might have bugs. 39.3 is almost rock steady.

I've made all my patches thus far with some variety of 0.40. I remember there being some huge problems when I tried to work with the same patches on mac, which had a pd-extended 0.39 version, and linux, which had some vanilla 0.40 version. If I switch to 0.39, might I get a bunch of compatibility problems?

well my advice would be either to use 0.39 extended or 0.40 vanilla. but if you want to use 0.4 extended, then you're sort of going out into only barely charted waters and unless you have a good navigation sense, you are likely to run into problems.

but yes, there are some features of 0.40 that won't work in 0.39, so if you are depending on that, then good luck.

(edit...you may as well try your 0.40 patches in 0.39 extended though...pd changes really slowly, so most things should be the same. the main difference i know of is that 0.40 and upwards allows for $ arguments within a message.... so for example, in 0.40, sending a float of 6 into 'one-two-three-four-five-$1-seven' will output 'one-two-three-four-five-6-seven'. where as in 0.39 and lower the $ argument can only be attached to the start of a message. there are other differences too, but mostly 0.4 patches should still work in 0.39 unless you luck out and use some of the new functions)