Lurked for a while, first post now.

I've been using Max/MSP pretty heavily since last December, and I've fallen in love with the visual coding paradigm. For a variety of reasons PD appeals to me more than Max (though I did get used to the bells and whistles). I've replaced all my hardware effects (loopers, stompboxes, synths, sequencers) with max patches, and I'd be comfortable enough making the same over again in PD, but I'm having trouble translating a few objects that I relied on heavily in Max.

Umenu is a big one, the ability to receive numbers and output corresponding text comes in handy with scripting lots of objects, and routing sends and receives. It's ease of populating, rewriting, and deleting of entries makes many complex tasks easily manageable. It also functions as a great label when I hid things away. I suspect there's an equivalent method, but nothing leaps out. Should I be looking at some sort of coll type object? Struct?

In the DSP realm, I'm a little worried not to see Rate~ or some analog of it. I use phasor~ to control my loops, and Rate~ works magic on polymetric sequences. I could probably rig up a similar system scaling and wrapping a signal, but straight up Rate would be best.

In order to be able to slot effects in and out of different parts of the signal chain, I've been using combinations of bpatchers and polys, with scripting to switch between different stompbox abstractions. I found the graph on parent option, but it doesn't seem (at least not obviously) that I can use scripting on it to call up different subpatches. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

I think those three might just cover it (at least for the time being). I've found the externals pulled from the max library to be an amazing resource, and between overlapping objects, manuals, and the answers on this forum most of what I need to know is readily available. If those objects lack analogs in PD I may just bite the bullet and get into java/c/python...at the moment I have no experience with text based programming, but I'm just looking for an excuse, really.

I'll be hitting the manuals cover to cover as best I can in the morning, but I'd be glad to have my patches running sooner all the same.

All help is much appreciated.

Aa

Thanks Maelstrom, that's a huge help. The biggest difficulty I've had so far is with documentation, really. Little things like scope~ needing to be written [Scope~] was a bit confusing, but PD works great. Popup looks good, and ought to do the trick.

I've looked into wrap~, and though it might be easier if it could accept wrapping arguments like max's pong~, I can surely force it into those ranges otherwise.
Making things longer surely will be a stumbling block, translating might not be so easy :S.

I've also realized there aren't any dsp conditionals, like >=~. I'd been using edge~ to convert phasor~'s zero crossings into bangs for a step sequencer and I can't think of any accurate equivalent (snapshot would be far too grainy).

Also wondering about matrix~, is the table method the only way? envelope style graphing works for monophonic, but I was hoping to do a monome/tenori-on type thing (actually the first thing I learned in max) and it seems significantly more difficult.

Are there externals I will need that aren't included in the recent PDextended release? Also wondering if anyone here is familiar with jMax, and if so if it would have the objects I'm looking for in an open source format. Will I need to tackle OSC to get these functionalities outside of Max?