Hi there. My little problem is that i can't choose between buying Max/MSP or diving for free in Pd. So i started to look for comparisons between these two.
As i see in wikipedia Max link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_(software) there is a long list of well known artists (like Aphex Twin, Tim Hecker) who are using it. As for Pd, there is absolutely no information on the web about famous musicians who are working with this software..
So my question is do you know any electronic/electroacoustic artists who are using Pd?
Or maybe in generally Pd is well less professional than Max?
From what i have tried i can say that sound quality is identical, just Max's interface is far more advanced..
Maybe Pd better suited for game music and for creating things like Reactable?
Thanks for answers.

I'm not really sure what you mean by "less professional." If you're saying it might be less suited for professional use, I would have to disagree. I have actually found Pd-extended to be more stable than Max 5. The differences in sound quality are generally negligible, if at all noticeable. And there are few things that one can do that the other can't (and they *both* have their advantages over the other). They are both great pieces of software, and you can probably get them both to do what you need them to do. Max is a commercial product, but that doesn't necessarily make it better suited for professional use. It just makes it commercial software.

The only thing that I've found that Max hands-down does better than Pd is the gui. But, really, it's not that big of a deal, because the gui offerings in Pd give you what you need to function. Most of the stuff in Max is eye candy that you end up wasting a lot of time working on. There are very few instances where the gui is actually very important to the functionality of the patch.

Max also has ReWire capabilities (one of the advantages of being commercial), but they are so buggy and the implementation is so crappy that it is hardly usable. David Zicarelli himself even said, in so many words, that ReWire sucks.

As far as famous artists go, keep in mind that Max has a longer history than Pd and so has has a bit of a foothold in this area. And, more importantly, it is a commercial product. You're likely to find a list of famous people using just about any commercially successful product because the advertising department knows it will get people to buy it. They find out if an artist has used it, even if only for a small part of one track, and then the go around saying, "Hey, Aphex Twin uses Max. You should buy it if you want to be like him."

As someone who has both programs, I can say this: Max/MSP/Jitter is not $800 better than Pd-extended. It's not even $250 better (which is the student discount price). And if you really must go for Max, the transition from Pd is not hard at all. I would at least say play with Pd for a while and decide if it's a paradigm that you really enjoy. If you find that you need the extra goodies that Max has and Pd doesn't, then download the demo and see if it's worth it.

And what we do know is that Brian Eno wrote an entire interactive game score in Pd - and EA (the games company) ported the program (as well as his patch) to run as part of the game Spore.

Pd gets ported and worked into ways where it can be used on Java enabled phones (pd2j2me) it's ported for iPhone and Android (RjDj), e.t.c, it finds its way into iPod classics and Xbox, Playstations... There is even a commercial product out there that is a puredata minicomputer communicated via ethernet, I believe. (can't remember the link though)

All this, is possible and made possible by the open source and free nature of Pure Data. You certainly can't do this with Max

It's a pleasure to agree with the others, Max "is not $800 better than Pd"!
The only thing I regret is the neatest gui: in Pd is not possible hiding ropes
(isn't it? please tell me it's possible..!); but this not worth 250¤!

Again, as maelstrom said:
"I would at least say play with Pd for a while and decide"

To conclude, I still have some doubts for sound quality among two, but probably the true question is: how could be possible that co-exist two so-much-similar-pieces of sofware one free and the other commercial?

Thank you all for anwers.
I asked about artists just because i was curious. I don't want to be like Aphex or any other one, i have to find my own way.
It's clear that Max's interface is better than Pd's, maybe even to eye candy. I think that older version of Max has best balanced interface, and if Pd will ever achieve similar one it will be outstanding.
Question is if better interface helps to achieve great results faster? Maelstorm, can you tell where is these few instances where the gui is very imporatant to the functionality? One little thing , but i found very inconvenient that it's not possible to cut wire with the mouse without going to edit/cut.
I have read in other forums that working with more advanced things like poly~, pfft~ and such in Pd is much or less harder than in Max, because of what i don't know:)
Talking about sound quality, i have tried just to compare basic patches with basic oscillators, i have to say that quality is equal..

One more thing about Pd is that it can't save midi settings. Every time i start the app, i have to setup it over and over.. Maybe i'm doing something wrong?

I have noticed a few notable differences between the two programs:

Max has better documentation, since they can pay people to write and maintain it.

Jitter has a few objects (the "slab" in particular) which make complex video mixing and shader processing a lot easier. That's not to say you can't do the same things in GEM that you can in Jitter, just that some of the more tedious and technical ground work is already done for you in Jitter.

Unexpectedly, I found Pd-extended to be much more stable when running patches with a webcam than Max/Jitter. I used the same setup with simple patches for both programs (simply displaying video from a webcam), and Pd-extended worked every time, no problem. Jitter, on the other hand, only recognized the webcam 50% of the time or less and a few times randomly dropped the video feed after having played fine for a few minutes. I know a number of artists that use Jitter with live video, so perhaps it was the model of my camera that was the problem, but this inconsistency (especially the random dropped feeds) was particularly disturbing to see from an $800 piece of software.

The GUI differences really don't bother me, except that I wish pd let you move and resize the Graph On Parent borders with the mouse rather than trial and error with the x/y/height/width values.

Oh, and multiple levels of undo would be very welcome.

(disclaimer: I have used pd WAY more than max, and have no intention of switching)

@snowball: I should probably clarify what I mean about gui and functionality. When I said there are few instances when the gui is very important to the functionality, I was referring to the fancier gui elements. I actually do believe in many cases the gui is important to the functionality. It is important when it gives you the proper visual feedback to help the user understand what's going on. In most cases, sliders, knob, number boxes, etc. present you with all you need. You don't always need interactive waveform displays or filter curves; and you aren't likely to need adjustable rounded corners, elaborate color schemes, gradients, and segmented patch cords. Now, to be honest, I am kind of a sucker for cool guis, and spent time doing "hacks" with what Pd provides to make them do things they weren't intended to do. But I have always gotten what I needed.

To give you an example of something that I felt needed a nice gui, here is a video presentation of my final project in college:

The idea was to use a Photoshop-based interface that most of us are in some way familiar with and do sound design with it. I did this in Max because I didn't think GEM had what I needed to do it (I've just recently looked at GridFlow, however, and I think it may have the missing pieces I was after). pd123's comment about Jitter similarly reflects my experience with this project. While it has the nice objects I wanted to use, it also had some irritating bugs that were hard to pin down. As a result, this project was, and still is, unfinished.

When it comes to "more advanced" things like [poly~] and [pfft~], this is one of the big differences between Max and Pd-vanilla. Max offers quite a bit more higher level objects, which make it easier for new users as they don't have to try and patch those things ([freqshift~], [gizmo~], and [stutter~] are a few others that come to mind). BUT, Pd offers what you need to patch most, if not all, of those yourself using the objects it does have. And, Pd-extended includes many externals and abstractions that clone Max objects. [nqpoly4], for example, is a [poly~] clone made with Pd objects. I haven't done much FFT in Pd, but as far as I can tell, [pfft~] is essentially like putting Pd's FFT objects in a subpatch and adjusting the blocksize with [block~]. I don't believe Max lets you adjust the blocksize per subpatch, so [pfft~] is a workaround for that.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think these high level objects are a bad idea. I use Pd-extended, after all .

Oh, and to answer your questions about using Pd, you can also just click on a cord and press delete. It's no different in Max there. And as for MIDI settings, Pd-extended has an abstraction called [get-midi-dialog] that can be used to save MIDI settings per patch.

Just a correction: Max/MSP/Jitter 5 is $699 and Max/MSP 5 is $495.
http://cycling74.com/shop/max/

Now that's a bargain

@snowball said:

Talking about sound quality, i have tried just to compare basic patches with basic oscillators, i have to say that quality is equal..

have you tried to record and invert the phase of output of one of the patches?

... sorry for the awful sounding of the question

No, i haven't and to be honest i didn't understand your question, sorry
Have you tried this, and what results you got?

sorry, i said it sounded awful.
what i mean is:

• you make a simply patch in pd, and the same patch in max
• you record the result of both
• then you compare the two recordings inverting the phase of one of the two recordings

this way we can see if the audio quality is the same or not.

i'm a too proud pd-user to download the trial of max!!!
... joking, i'm only too lazy...

i tried the max/msp for a while years ago, mostly for doing live sampling thingies. lately i took the bull by the horns and managed to build the same kinda things in pd. yes, it was a little hard at first, but this forum turned out to be a great resource. after all, the documentation seems to be the hardest part of pd... or to find out about the existence of all extensions in the first place..

the vst support, or more the unsupport (i'm using osx) seemed like a big deal first. but i got around it eventually. and realized that the basic delay, reverb, bit crusher, filters etc can be done very easily with basic extensions. and using vst's wasn't that easy in max/msp either (i'm talkin version 4 here...)

actually, if you plan to do mostly vst/au-heavy systems, plogue bidule might be worth checking out.

i do miss some of the fancier gui things in max, the waveform displays for example. but i managed to build a replacement in pd, it's a little funky but it works.

personally i've found pd to be at least as stable as max/msp.

Regarding the question of how to delete cables, as a software developer i can say the you can always benefit - in terms of workflow - when you know many keyboard shortcuts. This can help speeding up patching an aweful lot. And copy/paste between dialogs and patches (which worked of 0.40.3 i believe) can also be very handy (although copy/paste is often the root of all evil)...

Hey,
I'm quite missing some tool for fast patch debugging in pd. In MAX if you hover over the cable passing data are shown in floating box. In pd you have to connect number box to know... might be time consuming when tracking some data ( btw. also sending bang via mouse (right click context menu when hovering over the inlet?) would be helpful...)
ales

i prefer pd than max.

i dont like max 5 gui , is is not simple and direct.

and i have the same feeling that pd is more stable than max.

but the usability design of max is better than pd.
and max 5 help center is better too.

I have been attempting to create some music with Pd for about two weeks. It is difficult to understand the theory of the program and to solve issues (errors, patches that are downloaded and don't work as they should etc.). Although I appreciate the flexibility, there is what I would term a "steep learning curve" here. I'm not sure how long I can pursue before I have to find an easier way to get to the things I want to do. Ultimately I am in it for the music and the programming part is a tool. I wish there was clearer documentation so that I could get simple answers. Your thoughts would be appreciated.

It's true that there's quite some learning curve with pd. I've needed 2 attempts to get into it. The first attempt I was rather impatient and was overwelmed by all possibilities and got nowhere. The second time i've given myself about a month time of really trying. What I've noticed is that it helps if you know exactly what you want to achieve. Sometimes it can be better to limit yourself to try to implement just 1 simple idea, instead of trying to get to grips with everything at the same time. So if you have something in your mind and you really don't know where to get started, just post it here and people will try to help you out.

@domien said:

What I've noticed is that it helps if you know exactly what you want to achieve.

This is great advice.

I found that the best way to learn Pd is to start with a clear, simple goal in mind. If possible, break this goal down further into its components and work on one component at a time until you have achieved your goal.

Repeat.