Hey guys,
I'm new to this forum (and to puredata) so forgive me if I ask you some nooby shit.
Using PD for a uni project and I am finding it a little hard to get used to. I'm essentially wanting to make an Aphex twin style beat warper, (a good example of what I want to do) http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_kJbOrFKSnTg/StsjkEBCAnI/AAAAAAAAALA/wg3bnbGO5FM/s1600-h/beatmangle3.png
There is also a video of this thing working but I can't find the link.

Right now my patch is more or less just randomly changing the playhead position, I realise that I need to give the patch some way of dividing up the bars and beats and intelligently pick spots to play and "warp". Not sure if that poor description helps but If you have any kind of advice I will be greatful to hear it, Much love
Chris

this forum has a search function. almost everyone has made a beat mangler at some point, so think of some terms to enter into search and you'll find a whole bunch of hopefully useful things.

good luck.

hardoff(i think?) is right in saying that there is lots of existing beat manglers. I think it is an important part of learning PD in that it involves a lot of little tricks to help you later on.

Rather than rebuild that patch you showed the picture of, there are a few elements you should learn, and assemble to get there.

-writing to a table.
-reading from a table.
-reading audio from a table at a controllable speed.
-reading from any position on a table.
-getting the length of a table.
-use of $ to substitute in table lengths, current positions, "slice" size.

Further in your case you might want to detect transients, there may be an external for this or it might be vanilla now [knock] i think it was called.
Or you may have some other source of intelligent selection based on average positions for break retriggers/stutters, the golden mean, any thing else you can think of.
You could even throw in a bouncing ball delay, or gateing.

this will likely lead you to granular audio.

get patching!

yeah, it's me hardoff. i had to change my name so i could do some spam-fighting.

[knock] , i think you mean [bonk~] !

although, we could get together a petition to rally miller to change it to [donk~], that'd be pretty awesome.

Yeah, i thought i remembered the change happening, i just wasnt sure whether it had become a generic mod account.

bonk~ thats it! I'm just a little out of practice in my patching. Amiga and gameboy tracking has taken precedence of late.

I think [donk~] should be an external that just puts a bangin donk on it, at a specified pitch.

Holy crap, it's godinpants!

yeah, that'd be boss.

electro - put a donk on it!
techno - put a donk on it!
postmodern art gallery neural-network generative glitch patch - putting a bangin' donk on it!

Yeah recent events have conspired to bring me back to PD.
I've finally gotten it working again on my computer and have been looking to get back into visuals and homebrew dj software.

Back on topic though,
chrisdrums, it's best to think of this, like all other heavy patching as a sum of all parts exercise. It's a little miyagi/daniel san to talk about it this way, but i think that's how most of us go about these things.

Whenever you build a kind of "utility patch" like one that does any of the things i mentioned before, or any other nifty little tricks, you should isolate the minimum requirements for it to run, assign inputs and outputs for controls, audio and all that, and chuck it in a magic library folder which you can then lead to using [..\foldername\abstractionname]

Going totally off topic again: nice to see you back here mightily pantied god!

Thanks dom! it's nice to be back.