only BotBrs who login may tag

defeatistcore descriptioncore generative

This is an embarrassingly-simple module which jams around in an F# major blues scale (with an added D-natural for flavor - seriously, that note *has* to be in the F# major blues, the scale is so bland without it). Click the bang button to make it start. Close the program to make it stop. I designed it in purr-data. It uses stock vanilla PD modules.

It was going to be a bit more elaborate, with a more seasonal scale and alternating keys, but then I made the mistake of testing it in vanilla-pd and it wouldn't load and after literally one hour of silently bellowing while deleting modules and screwing around, it started loading - the exact same file that one hour ago wouldn't load. I don't even know anymore. It's genuinely all I can do to not name this "puredata is stu.pd". I think I deserve some credit for that amount of maturity, right? At least a "2" amidst all the "1"s, right? Ho ho ho?

So, I typed up a 5kb rant about Puredata and then deleted it because this is the holidays and we're supposed to be all about fun, food, family, and feelgoods. I know I should have a nice, pleasant, silly little description about how this module is, like, Santa's badass blues elf who just jams relentlessly on the piano like the workshop was a Nordstrom. I genuinely was thinking about it as I naively began what would turn out to be a four-hour exercise in terror and frustration. But I can't. I just can't. I spent four hours on this and the majority of it was spent mentally ranting about every frustrating aspect of Puredata.

In lieu of the full rant, here's my more-civilized takeaway from the experience: I think Puredata is in a really uncomfortable position where it's not quite a grizzled-old-computer-music-beardo's badass showboat tool (Bytebeat, TIC) and not quite a friendly low-stress intro to programming concepts (Klik n' Play) or modular synthesis (bespoke, vcv_rack, sunvox). It has a really gross UI that is uncomfortable with the mouse and yet insists on making you use it (best exemplified by how "[enter]" doesn't commit a new module, but rather just starts a new line, with the only way to commit the module being to click off it). It's unintuitive and frustrating in a sneaky way - when something like Knaecketraecker is unintuitive and frustrating, that's because it's a grizzled-old-computer-music-beardo's badass hobbyist tool, and as frustrating as it is, it's fundamentally fair. Eat Triple Baconator, get fat. Puredata lures you in with a GUI and (in the case of purr-data) cutesy cat icons, but then it leaves you listening to an increasingly-psychotic sample-and-hold blur for ten minutes because there's no obvious way to stop a program that's already running besides just disconnecting the "dac" module. That's like a flavorless salad that somehow has 6,000 calories and ten pounds of saturated fat.

Anyway, in all seriousness, I'm sorry this is crummy, please forgive me.

19

0

8

4

13