Making Musical Apps

Chapter 1. Introduction

Pure Data is a great audio engine; it is powerful, flexible, and extensible. With the appearance of libpd, its range has grown beyond the desktop to mobile and embedded settings. Its permissive BSD license allows developers to add libpd to virtually any project. The complete absence of dependencies means that you can build libpd as soon as you have a C compiler. Ready-made bindings for Java and Objective-C as well as support for Android and iOS help you get mobile apps off the ground in a hurry.

One of the most attractive features of Pd is its instantaneous interactive nature; you change the signal processing graph on the screen while Pd is running, and you hear the effect immediately. This makes it an excellent tool for prototyping audio components, especially for games.

In the past, game developers have rigged up development setups that connect a game to Pd using the networking capabilities of Pd. While this is an effective way of creating preliminary audio components, a prototype created in this way will always be a prototype, and the use of network objects in Pd introduces some friction into the patching process. In order to deploy components created in this manner, developers have to reimplement them in a format that can be shipped with the game.

With libpd, all these inefficiencies disappear. Sound designers can prototype audio components in Pd, using the same objects and techniques that they would use when creating a patch for any other purpose. When ...