Hi,

as you may have guessed from this and my previous post I'm still in the process to figure out the basics.
Doing so I attempt to open example patches and patches I find uploaded on the pd community site.
In more than 1 out of 2 cases the patch wouldn't generate sound but rather error messages of which this is by far the most common

error: inlet: expected ' ' but got 'float'

I do not understand under which circumstances such an error message occurs. What I really do not understand how would someone upload a patch that has obvious error in it? My only answer is that the patch in question runs well in the developer's environment but not in mine. But that scares me more : How can patches not be portable from one machine to another?

Hmm I'm scratching my head. I'd be thankful for any clues.

Best
Jurgen

that is a symptom of an earlier error - you are sending messages to an object that couldn't be created - usually because it could not be found.

objects can be defined by abstractions (like foo.pd -> [foo]) or by "externals" which are usually written in C and have to be compiled (like bar.dll or bar.pd_linux -> [bar]).

to complicate things further, compiled externals can define more than one object class - these are "libraries" - you might have quux.pd_linux or quux.dll that defines [baz] but to actually get [baz] you have to load the [quux] library with -lib quux or something.

there's a little thing in pd's menubar for 'find last error'

often that will help you find the object that is missing.

thanx! I found that handy debugging help.

I my case it was that libraries didn't load properly so the objects of the extended version were not available.
I'm learning, slowly but surely