MSP, MAX and PD [was: Re: Sound Mandalas]

Hello Jacky and Lawrence!
And everyone!

>>> Too bad I'm on a PC, heard good things about MAX/MSP.

>> ITS THE ONLY PACKAGE THAT MIGHT PERMIT ME TO TAKE THIS FURTHER,
>> IT IS CURRENTLY BEING DEVELOPED FOR WINDOWS ON PC.

> Ah, this is good! You MACkies have all the fun!

You silly rabbits!

Hm, hey you guys, it's us Mac people that are missing out!

See here: now, it was Miller Puckette (as in Miller
*S*. Puckette, or MSP) who invented MAX (tribute to Max
Mathews) at IRCAM to be a graphical front end for IRCAM's
ultra fancy ISPW DSP board. Then, a commercial version of
MAX that was limited to MIDI processing functions was
brought forth by David Zicarelli for Opcode.

Since then, Miller has created a completely new
application for manipulating data in real time called PD
(Pure Data). Completely written from scratch in a clean
room, but conveniently 100% backwards compatible with MAX,
and yet it does SO MUCH MORE. Miller is without equal. He
is the world's *greatest* meta musical instrument
designer, a fine composer, a mathematical genius, and an
all-around wonderful and fun and easygoing family man. His
software engineering is on par with Kerighan and Ritchie.
Any one who has met him is fortunate indeed. Miller is
someone that we would all be incredibly jealous of if he
wasn't so darn modest!

Miller's greatest work of art, PD, is simply the most
fantastic real-time digital audio tool kit in existence.
And that's just a massive oversimplification of what it
is. Heck, you could patch it up to monitor and analyze
stock quotes coming in off the internet if you like, then
generate 3D graphics and algorithmic compositions that
reflect up-to-the-millisecond real-time pork belly
futures. And you could do it all without having to
learn any complicated weird stuff.

The realtime audio processing kernel scales to run on
multiple processors. (So if you are a millionaire or Intel
executive and your computer has an array of 16 1Ghz
Pentium 4s then you have a 16Ghz real time audio rendering
engine that you can easily program using a graphical,
object-oriented, streaming data processing language to do
_anything_.) There is also a fantastic plugin for it that
enables you to run realtime 3D graphics off of the crazy
thing (GEM). Development is subsidized by a grant from
Intel because it runs on Windows NT as well as Linux and
really makes Intel look _goooood_ (say this with a low,
gutteral voice).

What is this MSP you are all so crazy about? Well it is a
port done by Zicarelli's company, Cycling74, of PD's core
to the PPC to work with the Opcode version of MAX.

How can Cycling74 do that? Easy, PD comes with all the
source code, is free, and the license says you can do
anything you want with it at all, even include it in a
commercial application.

See where I'm heading? MSP/MAX is just a shadow of PD. PD
is where it's really at. And if you've got Linux or NT
(and it works somewhat under 95/98, but you know how 95/98
is as goes stability), it's --100% FREE--. But I must
caution the dilentantes on this list. If you get it you
will no longer have any excuses not to write music because
you don't have the right tools.

Now when you do come up with your own PD plug ins,
effects, processors, patches, etc. that are oh-so-amazing,
keep things balanced and put some of them in the public
domain. Share the joy! Share and enjoy!

Why are you waiting? The only reason I want someone --
anyone -- to send me their unused PC is so I can
turn it into a PD box.

It's the sort of thing that's so dang good, I want to keep
it all to myself, but oh well! Now stop fooling around and
go get it! It's on Miller's web page at UCSD:

http://crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/

- Jeff, President of the Miller S. Puckette Fan Club