I took part in Algorave in Gateshead on 26th April. Apart from being incredibly awesome it was my first time live coding – or rather live patching – visuals in Pure Data from scratch. I emphasise from scratch because nearly all of my performances involve me modifying patches, but never starting with a completely blank canvas. I also occasionally used the HSS3jb as a texture for objects, but never on its own. It’s also great for when crashes occur, which is/was often ;-). Here’s a few sampels of my visuals. Videos by Mariam Rezaei:

I learnt a few things about Pure Data that night, and my general opinion is that it isn’t that great as a live coding visuals tool.

One of first issues is encapsulation of objects. This can be done quite easily but it’s a manual process which would involve cutting all cords and reconstructuring a patch. That is, you would have to cut the selection of objects, paste them into a sub patch and then reattatch it. By way of comparison, Max/MSP has this as a feature already, whereas this isn’t mentioned at all on the bug tracker Feature request is now on the bug tracker. Not being able to auto encapsulate objects makes reuse a bit more difficult and cumbersome, which resulted in some really messy patches from me on the night.

This also relates to another issue of object insertion. When I was building my patches I would often have to preempt what I would need. I nearly always started with [gemhead]-[translateXYZ]-[rotateXYZ]-[repeat 10]-[rotateXYZ]-[translateXYZ]-[color]-[cube]. Inserting any additional objects required me to cut the cord and therefore the screen output. This would be solved if there were, for example, a method whereby if two objects were selected, the next object was inserted in between them. This is obviously an over-simplified specific use case which would need more thought behind it. Again, no mention of it on the bug tracker. Feature request is now on the bug tracker.

There were other thoughts I had on the night, such as the incosistencies and clumsiness of using the [repeat] object, the lack of a snap-to-grid option for aligning objects, the tiny size of inlets and outlets – even when the ojbects themselves may be huge, which is only exaggerated when using a 13″ 1080p screen, and the lack of a toolbar (yes, I am aware of GUI plugins), but these are the two which I felt would’ve helped me most.

Has much else been written about the use of Pure Data for live coding visuals?