Steve’s Stuff

Success! After trying so hard to get Pd to play long samples, I finally decided to learn some Reaktor programming. Reaktor is a modular synthesis environment from Native Instruments. It’s a lot like Pd, but it’s a lot easier to make interesting software instruments. For instance, if you want an array of wave forms to choose from, you just create an oscillator bank whereas in Pd you would need to calculate all of the different waves you want to use, leaving a lot of room for error and such. It’s particularly useful for things like filters and reverb. In Pd you have to design your own filters (lots of math involved), but in Reaktor, you can just drop in what you want.

Yeah, this makes it a lot easier, but that doesn’t make the results invalid - just efficient. I’ve used Pd plenty. I know I can build most of the things in Reaktor, but it takes so long and I don’t see the point when I have a better tool available. Pd is a great learning tool and using it allowed me to jump right into Reaktor without much trouble.

Anyway, the point is, Reaktor has a multi channel “tape player” that stores audio files of any size in memory and can play them back efficiently. Pd just never offered any good way to do this easily, so I’m switching mostly to Reaktor. When I say “easily” I mean, a way that I could figure out in three weeks. I’m sure plenty of people have done similar things in Pd, but they probably have double my programming experience or more. In the end, all that matters is that it works. No extra points for doing it the hard way.

This shows Reaktor’s Tape Player

This is the top-level Reaktor code

This is some lower level code. As you can see, it’s basically connecting modules like in Pd. At its most basic, it has all the same low-level objects as Pd, but it also has a great library of ready-made stuff.