Pure Data Resources

17 Aug '08

When I started learning Pure Data (or Pd) a couple of weeks ago, it was difficult to find good tutorials and examples. In the end I used a couple of different tutorials to take my first steps in this language:

• Linux Journal’s Managing Audio with Pd. This is a simple absolute beginner’s tutorial for Pd that explains the basic operations and aims to create a simple delay effect.
• The Tutorials that come with Pd! Pd comes with many (really a lot) of great tutorial patches. If you download Pd, you can go into the installed folder (on Mac OS X right click the Pd application and select “Show Package Contents”) and find the folder called “doc”. Inside here are numbered chapters of an enormous tutorial for Pd! Another way to find this folder is download the source code for Pd.
• Miller Puckette’s book: The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music. This is a textbook written by the creator of Pd which uses the language to illustrate all the examples. It’s distributed online for free!
• The help patches! When you’re editing a Pd patch, you can right click on object and select “Help”. This (usually) opens another patch that explains the function of the object and gives an example. Awesome!