On 14/02/16 22:27, Matti Viljamaa wrote:
Do you think Pd has a characteristic sound to it? Or whether
discussion board threads claiming Pd (and Max) have a distinct (and
not good) sound just have people who haven’t listened to good
patches?

Some issues with Pd that affect sound character:

1. cos~ (and osc~) use a small table with linear interpolation, which means there is quite a lot of interpolation noise - I wrote about it here: http://mathr.co.uk/blog/2015-04-21_approximating_cosine.html

2. vcf~ (and probably other recursive filters) use single precision floating point in the feedback loop (pd-double might be different) which causes weird rounding artifacts - I wrote about it here: http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2010-08/082104.html

3. cubic interpolation (tabread4~ etc) in Pd uses an (imho) incorrect algorithm - it makes a curve that goes through 4 points instead of matching the derivatives at the nearest 2 points, which leads to sharp corners at the original sample points with associated aliasing artifacts - this has been discussed on the lists many times in the past, for example here: http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2008-06/062864.html and: http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2010-03/077278.html

4. sig~ (and implicit sig~ from float messages to signal inlets) is steppy and only takes effect at block boundaries - compare with .kr in SC3 which is (afaik) linearly interpolated between each block boundary

5. Pd doesn't print enough digits to perfectly reconstruct floating point values when round-tripping through files, so (eg) biquad~ coefficients can become imprecise if you don't write them outside Pd in a text editor

6. other systems tend to come bundled with more nice-sounding stuff like bandlimited oscillators etc, with Pd you tend to have to find externals yourself (deken should make that easier now)


Claude
--
http://mathr.co.uk

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