i am going to buy a new pc.
what is better for pd a windows pc or a mac ?

Following posts here a while, and being a Windows user, I think your best bet is Mac.

Windows is functional, but fairly flaky, and its stability is strongly tied to how well your drivers perform *under development environment stresses*. You learn to work around it, but I still occasionally freeze everything up so bad I need to reboot. I believe the true culprit is my audio device driver - 9 times out of 10 I can recover without a reboot by disabling my audio driver, which in turn allows me to kill the PD process, which in turn allows me to re-launch PD...

This is a commercial Roland UA-101 driver that never gives me issues under any other circumstance on my Win 7 platform.

There are many functions, e.g., MIDI functions, that will even tell you they're not supported on Windows when you try to use them. *Some* of those messages are in error, they still work, but still...

I think these messages reflect the time-honored undercurrent of "windows is bad & unix/mac is good" - actually inherent in the implementation.

With mac, you will certainly get better support with the product & from mac users on this forum.

I should add, that most of my issues are when I'm doing some off-the-wall, probably ill-advised, experimentation, as I'm just learning pd. Although my bat-shit crazy audio experiments occasionally seize up audio on Windows hard, the pd runtime is otherwise extremely stable. If you are using/running tested patches or just tweaking algorithms, pd on Win7 is more stable than a lot of other products I own - some quite pricey.

Just my perspective,

Shawn

PS - I was experimenting with partconv~ the other day, trying to make it work with two real-time audio inputs. I created a patch that KILLS pd/audio and requires a reboot. I can't even load the patch anymore. Anybody want to try this very simple patch on their system??? How lucky do you feel? ;^)

out of windows and mac I'd definitely suggest mac. It's hardware is good and integrated with the operating system, and I believe CoreAudio is efficient. The last time I used windows was in '09 but I agree that pd seemed way better supported on mac at the time. Mac is also unix which I believe is closer to linux than windows. (I think many devs use linux). I believe it's more posix complaint than windows also
I would definitely recommend considering linux: pd is supported very well for linux, it's usually cheap. Personally I'd take linux over Windows any day

Linux, because it doesn't impose vendor lock-in on you.

More precisely: Xubuntu, because it's relatively simple and user-friendly. Be prepared though to encounter some audio troubles which you don't find on the others. Pulseaudio in particular, an audio mixer which you may want to disable in some situations.

I went from MaxMSP to Pd and later from OSX to Linux. In both cases it was a relief to be liberated from the continuous commercial constraints, tricks and pressures to upgrade hardware and OS for big money every few years. Initially I found Linux a bit less user friendly than OSX, but that was also a matter of being more familiar with OSX while Linux was new for me.

Katja

the problem is, that apple doesn't support my mac book pro (2010) anymore as well my ipad 1. more - i have no "~" as one key on a german keyboard i have to hit 2 or more keys.

if i use linux on my windows notebook, there could be a problem with drivers !?
i have no experience to find for my notebook all drivers i need.
what about viruses under linux ?

if i had help converting to linux, i'll do it.

Linux, huzzah!

I have had almost zero problems with drivers in Linux (Ubuntu/Ubuntu Studio/Xubuntu/CrunchBang being the flavors I've used). I've been amazed at how quickly almost everything works. Of course, I don't have much that NEEDS drivers; I don't have much, at all. But my printers, USB devices (incl. MidiUSB), everything I've plugged in (except a smartphone - but that's Samsung's fault) has gone off without a hitch. Audio, video, wireless, all worked immediately.

It shouldn't be TOO difficult to install Linux (i.e., Xubuntu Studio) as a dual-boot on your Windows machine. Sadly, though, I'm NOT the person to help you through it. I'm just a cheerleader.

I would say, I did it myself ~4 years ago, with almost no understanding of the intricacies of computers, and have been an enthusiastic Linux advocate ever since.

More enthusiastic than knowledgeable, though.

Xubuntu tends to be less of a CPU-drag. CrunchBang has been great for me (VERY efficient for my 2006 laptop), but is less user-friendly.

I'd say, download the Ubuntu (or Xubuntu - I agree with Katjav) Live-CD (might be DVD-sized now, actually). You can run off of that (though it's always been horribly slow for me, running the OS off of a CDr), and use it to install (either wiping your whole drive, or as dual-boot... the installation process guides you through it).

Also - no viruses, that I know of. (but is this true, or is there a virus that makes me say "No Viruses on Linux" on every post? You'll never know!)

i'll go with virtualbox and try xubuntu first. my laptop is a strong one and should handle this. thanks for help

wich audio driver do you use

ALSA driver, it is installed by default. Device specific drivers are compiled into the kernel, and many audio interfaces work out of the box, although tweaking of controls may be required.

In Xubuntu, all software available from the official repository can be installed via Synaptic. Software which is not in the repo but available as .deb file (like Pd-extended) should be installed with gdebi (which in turn you can get via Synaptic).

You may need to install some codecs etc. not available in the official repository (like liblame). In Synaptic go to Settings > Repositories and enable the restricted stuff. Then do Reload to include everything in the database.

The default audio mixer in Xubuntu's panel is for PulseAudio. Pd doesn't use PulseAudio and suspends the mixer. If you have trouble setting sound card controls, install XFce4-mixer and include it in the panel.

Katja

if i choose alsa, i get an audio io error and distorted sound.

i have installed pd from the store !

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/Screenshot_2014-02-01_18.33.20.png

May need to twiggle your pd audio settings[Menu under 'Media] : a little longer 'Delay' or larger 'Block Size'? Processor may be outrunning the process that's trying to digest the signal?

maybe the virtualbox is the problem ?