And that's not the end of the vicious cycle.
Students who saved their money to buy a Max license are often unwilling
to
accept that their work could have been done as easy in Pd, and
sometimes even
better and/or easier.
If you think of free
software as an ethical issue like I do and are talking about free
programs that have a
proprietary alternative, there is still an important division between
those programs that are
free and superior to their proprietary counterparts on practical
grounds, and those that
don't have the same feature set as their proprietary counterparts (but
are still quite good).
In terms of ease of patching, Pd is clearly in the latter camp-- Max has
infinite undo, a
"Tidy Up" that actually _does_ something useful, and a set of externals
that allows to make
multiple connections at once and lots of other shortcuts (maybe these
are part of the core now,
I'm not sure). Plus tooltips, anchors to resize guis/boxes/messages,
and probably lots of
other things that make patching easier.
I use Pd and free software (almost) exclusively, but we should be clear
about which features
are available and which are not.
and you're only talking about the aesthetical/workflow features. to bring
up a subject that I am paying attention only now, try out to see how high
you go with [expr pow(2,$f1)] until you loose resolution - 20 in pd, but
30 in max5 (the coming up of Pd double precision will help this, but it's
a work Katja is doing alone).
Which means, for example, in max you have more resolution than Pd to
control the playback of large arrays with precision (up to 2147483647,
around 12h of audio at 48KHz). High moral feeling (i.e. the "we're better
because we're free" logo) isn't enough for precision dsp.
_______________________________________________
[email protected] mailing list
UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management ->
http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
