Pure Data

Pure Data

Pure Data with many patches open (netpd project)
Original author(s)	Miller Puckette
Stable release	0.47.1 / June 19, 2016; 8 months ago (2016-06-19)
Operating system	Cross-platform
Platform	Cross-platform
Available in	C
License	Modified BSD
Website	puredata.info

Pure Data (Pd) is a visual programming language developed by Miller Puckette in the 1990s for creating interactive computer music and multimedia works. While Puckette is the main author of the program, Pd is an open source project with a large developer base working on new extensions. It is released under a license similar to the BSD license. It runs on GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, iOS, Android and Windows. Ports exist for FreeBSD and IRIX.

Pd is very similar in scope and design to Puckette's original Max program, developed while he was at IRCAM, and is to some degree interoperable with Max/MSP, the commercial successor to the Max language. They may be collectively discussed as members of the Patcher family of languages.

With the addition of the Graphics Environment for Multimedia (GEM) external, and externals designed to work with it (like Pure Data Packet / PiDiP for Linux, Mac OS X), framestein for Windows, GridFlow (as n-dimensional matrix processing, for Linux, Mac OS X, Windows), it is possible to create and manipulate video, OpenGL graphics, images, etc., in realtime with extensive possibilities for interactivity with audio, external sensors, etc.

Pd is natively designed to enable live collaboration across networks or the Internet, allowing musicians connected via LAN or even in disparate parts of the globe to create music together in real time. Pd uses FUDI as a networking protocol.

Pure Data and Max are both examples of dataflow programming languages. In such languages, functions or "objects" are linked or "patched" together in a graphical environment which models the flow of the control and audio. Unlike the original version of Max, however, Pd was always designed to do control-rate and audio processing on the host central processing unit (CPU), rather than offloading the sound synthesis and signal processing to a digital signal processor (DSP) board (such as the Ariel ISPW which was used for Max/FTS). Pd code forms the basis of David Zicarelli's MSP extensions to the Max language to do software audio processing.