Good morning everybody;

I am almost on the verge of making a switch from Pure Data to Max/MSP and I would like to consult the PD community to see if there's any reasons why I should reconsider my choice.
I'm totally torn; while I want to support the open community the saying "you get what you pay for" seems to ring true here.

My reasoning so far is:

A) There is NO driver support for Focusrite soundcards. I've a Saffire Pro40 on my desktop and Scarlet 6i6 for my laptop. However PD only uses the stereo in/out I/Os. There is no multichannel support for Focusrite. This is an issue with Focusrite but greatly affects my PD usage. - £150 for Max or £1000 for 2 new soundcards.

Although I've not really much experience with Max; Pure Data seems to be fairly unstable. It's glitched and almost crashed 100% of the time that I've used it for my live set. It's quite challenging to play chill out at 6am while digital glitch and distortion is occurring.

C) Once again; I've not much experience with Max in this arena; though the sound quality of PD seems to be lacking. I've mimicked some of my favorite synths and rebuilt them in PD, but the sound I get from them is just a bit, well bleh. Experience of this with Max anyone?

I've had bit of a play with Max on the 30 day trial, and there's certainly some elements of it that frustrate me and I think PD owns in.

So I'd like to put my dilemma to the PD community and get your opinions.

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

A : Strange. No multichannel support ? Switch OS or sound cards. What OS are you running ? AFAIK, Pd supports what your OS supports. I've used 24 outputs without any problem.

B : Strange. I sometimes run into bugs, but 100% chance to have a bug is a symptom of your setup being unstable or you driving Pd nuts with bad practices.

C : Sarcasm : if it sounds bleh, maybe your Pd skills are bleh. Compare against Max, record and analyse the sound.

Hi Modified,

are you sure that multichannel isn't possible with your soundcards in pd on windows? My maximum is 2in/4outs, but I always thought that multichannel within pd was only a matter of configuration (media/audio settings menu, or some config file). I hope we will read soon reactions from multichannel users here that will reassure us
Do you use the jack soundserver ? It is often recommended (if not mandatory) in such a context.

I couldn't help you further as I am a Linux user. Maybe could you give a try to a linux distribution (can be installed on your conputer in a multiboot fashion, letting you the choice of the os to work with). The one I use is pretty well "tuned" and radically music-oriented : http://tangostudio.tuxfamily.org/en/ts-debian .

One of the things I like with linux realtime kernels is that it allows me to set realtime "priorities" to my processes. I work on an old pentium 4 computer most of the time, so if I don't tweak priorities I get clicks with big patches. The power of the computer you use is probably by far higher, but how big are your patches ? GUI objects are well-known bottlenecks, and the ability to give a higher priority to pd-extended than to pd-gui is very useful (under linux, but also under windows, I suppose). I don't know if you'd put this realtime-stuff into the "stability" drawer.

I never found someone that could have this kind of "tuning" precision on windows, even if I have several friends doing music on windows. And there's more, like putting some processes under watch to detect if they quit unexpectedly and relaunch them automatically (so useful in a performance). I don't practice that personally, put this musician (http://blog.sebastian-arnold.net/2011/08/loopdeck-embedded-linux-system/) uses a personal system based on a linux box without a screen, meaning he could manage quite efficiently this kind of stability issue.
(I must say this was three years ago, as I think he switched to an apple+max/msp system now)

Besides this I only wanted to comment your post, not preaching for linux. Many musicians need some "key" applications that they simply can't do without, and these may not run under linux. It seems clear to me that it is possible to get a very sharp audio system under linux, sharper than windows I mean, but it will certainly not be a straightforward switch in most cases, and for those which use key applications simply not covered by liux-based applications this will even become impossible.
A rewarding challenge, but this can be evaluated with the use of live dvds that allow you to use linux even without installing it (but an install is recommended to be able to modify configuration). According to http://www.linuxmao.org/Cartes+son+des+membres&structure=Accueil+Materiel your saffire pro40 should work.

But... stop ! I talking about linux again. Dough.

Regarding windows, some friends of mine gained stability with a setup using many controllers such as joysticks, tablets, dj gear and drumpads when they decided to invest into a professional usb hub.

But jack is the first thread to follow, imho.

Nau

about the sound quality: One of the main differences in my opinion between pd vanilla and max/msp is that max/msp has many more pre-made objects that are useful for making music and good sounds out of the box. (bandlimited oscillators for instance)
in pd usually you have to do a bit of digging or program them yourself, but you can definitely find solutions such as mmb bandlimited oscillators, and a lot of stuff in the help files and rjdj sound good too. I've heard many many projects in pd that sound really good.

Now for the theoretical part: I don't think there would be any reason why pd would have worse sound quality than max/msp except for the functionalities of the built-in objects; that is to say that the environment itself is not to blame for lower sound quality. All signal flow in the program is "transparent"
This being said I'm aware that tabread4~ interpolates with a different algorithm (hermite spline) in the max/msp equivalents than in pd (which uses lagrange) but there is a clone of this interpolation scheme in the nusmuk library. hermite spline interpolation can sound better in some cases.

+1 fer linux > windows

I'm gonna add to the chorus of concerned voices about your soundcard issues. I've got a megacrap USB 7.1 external soundcard, and, with nudging only a few settings, it's been good with PD-extended on both Linux and Mac. Now, I certainly don't know what other specifics might be getting between your computer and your happiness, but it seems like it could be as "simple" as some setting being off.

(I'm only a recent mac user, so it took me a while to figure out that I had to set something in the mac's "audio control" as well as in PD's settings, in order to get my external card to work)

While I'm here, I'll also second the "hide-yr-GUIs" approach. Using tables instead of arrays, etc, got rid of all my glitches.

I'm 90% sure there's soundcard issues.
I say 90% as a year ago I used my Saffire Pro40 8 inputs for a project and it seemed to work fine (it took me a while of setting changing but eventually worked).
That was the last project I did with my Pro40.

I then got my Scarlet 6i6 for my laptop in October last year and tried multichannel with that but had no success what so ever.
I returned to the Pro40 on my desktop to find that it was now no longer supporting multichannel and the old project that used to work no longer does.

I got in touch with Focusrite at the start of this year about it and this is what was said:

@Focusrite said:

Adding multichannel WDM is still something that our development team are looking into. Unfortunately it isn't something that is a quick "fix" and does require planning and time to implement. Unfortunately we do not have a date or timescale for when, if at all, this will be done.

If Max allows the use of ASIO drivers (which as far as I am aware it does) then you will be able to use all of the i/o on the interface at the same time, rather than just the one stereo pair that WDM allows. Its worth pointing out that WDM does only allow one stereo stream at at time, so even if you have all of the i/o available you will only be able to output to one pair of outputs at a time.

Best Regards, --
Focusrite Technical Support

@Focusrite said:

> Thanks for the email and sorry to hear you're having some problems.
>
>
> Unfortunately, this is due to the fact that Pure Data uses WDM drivers which only allows inputs & outputs 1 & 2, regardless of the interfaces i/o count. DAW software such as Pro Tools and Logic allow all i/o to be used. We have recently raised this with our developers and shortly we should have a new WDM driver which allows all inputs/outputs to be seen, should the development be accepted.

@dwan said:

A : Strange. No multichannel support ? Switch OS or sound cards. What OS are you running ? AFAIK, Pd supports what your OS supports. I've used 24 outputs without any problem.

I'm using Windows 7 64bit Home Premium on my desktop and the same on my laptop.
I paid £400 for my Saffire and £200 for my Scarlet all within the last few years; I really can not afford/justify buying two new soundcards for £600 when Max is only £150 (student) and I know through the 30day trial 100% works.

@dwan said:

B : Strange. I sometimes run into bugs, but 100% chance to have a bug is a symptom of your setup being unstable or you driving Pd nuts with bad practices.

I rarely have stability issues on my desktop but I don't take that out to gigs though. My laptop is 6gb ram. 1.65GHz processor. I've decided to get a new laptop with 8gb ram, I5 2.60GHz processor; so we will see if that changes things.
Once I've upgraded my laptop I'll see if the instability remains; it's a btard as it usually works fine at home; it's just when playing live I get the glitches and distortion.

It's not even a big project; only 5 WAVs playing at 1 time, some filtering and a few small VST plug-ins used. I've played in Cubase and Ableton absolutely fine, and both of them eat more power through needless bulk (why I chose to do it in PD in the first place).

People have been telling me linux for a long time; my main issue is I use PD with Vvvv which is Windows only. I also produce most of my music in Cubase too which seems unsupported with Linux. I know I could split my machine and have Linux on a partition for the Cubase issue; though that still leaves me in a situation when using VVVV.

The sound quality comment I kinda knew was more my programming than the software, wanted to have that verified though. I've been using PD for a year now so there's still a lot for me to learn and from playing with max for 30 days I do prefer PD 100% and I'd rather support the open community.

My main concern though is the multi-channel as it is fundamental to all I'm doing.
When playing live I use channels 3+4 for headphone monitoring; last gig I played I had to mix without being able to hear where my next track was; obviously not ideal for beatmatching.

My final degree project is going to be multi-channel installation so also quite vital for that too.

@Focusrite said:

> Thanks for the email and sorry to hear you're having some problems.
>
>
> Unfortunately, this is due to the fact that Pure Data uses WDM drivers which only allows inputs & outputs 1 & 2, regardless of the interfaces i/o count. DAW software such as Pro Tools and Logic allow all i/o to be used. We have recently raised this with our developers and shortly we should have a new WDM driver which allows all inputs/outputs to be seen, should the development be accepted.

I think it is possible to use jack with the asio driver (multichannel), and pd working under jack. I found people on webpages writing cubase and vvvv can be used under jack too, so the entire workflow seems to be sustainable.

Nau

@nau said:

@Focusrite said:

> Thanks for the email and sorry to hear you're having some problems.
>
>
> Unfortunately, this is due to the fact that Pure Data uses WDM drivers which only allows inputs & outputs 1 & 2, regardless of the interfaces i/o count. DAW software such as Pro Tools and Logic allow all i/o to be used. We have recently raised this with our developers and shortly we should have a new WDM driver which allows all inputs/outputs to be seen, should the development be accepted.

I think it is possible to use jack with the asio driver (multichannel), and pd working under jack. I found people on webpages writing cubase and vvvv can be used under jack too, so the entire workflow seems to be sustainable.

Nau

Awesome; I will try this out and report back on the success of this.

Its a pretty huge flaw of Focusrite to not support this. As one of the largest and leading soundcard companies; I'd have thought that driver support would be quite high on their priority lists as I know for fact that rivals like Motu work swimmingly with PD.... Though that is on a Mac so it might be different.