faust VS plugdata

Glicol looks very cool! Also check out Faust if you haven't (https://faust.grame.fr), another FP sound programming language.

The linked (https://github.com/grame-cncm/faust) looks reasonable to me.

Chata probably needs to work out roughly what the semantics of the language should be. Its good to know what the library support is intended to be as that informs language design (assuming the library is to be implemented in chata anyway). Quite a lot of this page is about syntax.

There are some design decisions that have deep impact on programming languages. Reflection, mutation, memory management, control flow, concurrency. There are some implementation choices that end up constraining the language spec - python seems full of these.

Echoing p4bl0, implementing the language will change the spec. Writing a spec up front might be an interesting exercise anyway. I'd encourage doing both at the same time - sometimes describe what a feature should be and then implement it, sometimes implement something as best you can and then describe what you've got.

Implementation language will affect how long it takes to get something working, how good the thing will be and what you'll think about along the way. The usual guidance is to write in something familiar to you, ideally with pattern matching as compilers do a lot of DAG transforms.

- I'd say that writing a language in C took me ages and forced me to really carefully think through the data representation.

- Writing one in lua took very little time but the implementation was shaky, probably because it let me handwave a lot of the details.

- Writing a language in itself, from a baseline of not really having anything working, makes for very confusing debugging and (eventually) a totally clear understanding of the language semantics.

Good luck with the project.

Faust integration would be awesome: https://faust.grame.fr Then again we have MaxMSP, so in the end it feels kind of redundant

Csound is extremely powerful, but my favorite thing in this vein these days is Faust:

https://faust.grame.fr/

It's a functional language with a nice way of generating diagrams of DSP algorithms, but its big killer feature for me is its language bindings, which include C, C++, Cmajor, Codebox, CSharp, DLang, Java, JAX, Julia, JSFX, "old" C++, Rust, VHDL, and WebAssembly (wast/wasm) out of the box.

Have a look at FAUST as well: https://faust.grame.fr/

Once you have an idea of basic programming practice, you need to learn some DSP programming. One of the better tools for this is Faust https://faust.grame.fr/ , bear in mind this is a functional programming language, and has very different syntax to C++, but the same principles apply.

Max4Live is what got me into Ableton, it also got me out of Ableton...

As someone who had been using PureData for quite a while the idea of having that kind of development environment integrated into the DAW was super exciting, unfortunately the actual implementation leaves a lot to be desired; personally the final straw was when I realized that the Max process space was global to Ableton so that global variables would leak between devices (no sandboxing)... This may have been addressed in further releases as I was a very early adopter, but all of the other issues pointed out by the other posters still stand.

If you're looking for a platform agnostic alternative to Max4Live there is PlugData[0] which is a VST implementation of PureData -- the open-source origin of Max and created by the same authors.

And there is the Grid for Bitwig[1] which offers a modular graph based MIDI/DSP programming environment that runs at audio rate and is fully integrated into the DAW as a native solution! The Grid is somewhat limited as it isn't extensible, but it supports >95% of common use cases and is used internally to build Bitwig's native devices. Hopefully in the future Bitwig will extend it's open API surface to include building custom Grid modules -- in the meantime PlugData is perfectly acceptable patch for doing unusual logic calculations and doing left-field things like interfacing with robotics :)

[0] https://plugdata.org/

Automatonism is ongoing, and if you're looking for better UX (as well as a ton of other excellent features, like making plugins and compiling for Daisy) then you should absolutely check out https://plugdata.org!

Sweet! It works now in plugdata, too!

An alternative for this is PlugData -- a native VST host for PureData (the open-source sibling of Max; same original author)

The Rust audio environment might need help, if you're into that:

https://rust.audio/

Maybe this might be worth a look, too:

https://plugdata.org/

It's a recent attempt to make Pure Data more accessible for less technically inclined users.

Well, Miller created Max, which back in those days was more about composition than synthesis and relied on external hardware to create sound. Another fella took Max and developed the commercial product and developed it some more. During this time home computers became good enough for realtime synthesis so Miller developed PD which combined aspects of Max with realtime audio synthesis capabilities. Max thought this was pretty great so integrated pd into Max which gave us Max/MSP, Max is Max Mathews who developed the Music(n) family of programing languages and MSP is Miller S. Puckette.

I would not say that pd or Max/MSP is more approachable, they are pretty even these days unless you stick to vanilla pd with no externals which almost no one does, the main differences is that Max/MSP gives you all you need out of the box but pd can run just about anywhere including in plugins if you are that sort. Max/MSP is considerably more modern in aesthetic but PlugData[0] and PurrData[1] offer more modern interfaces for pd with a few new tricks, PlugData is a plugin version of pd (also standalone), Purrdata is a JavaScript rewrite of the interface with prepackaged externals and solid documentation. And we have a handful of other varieties of pd each which have their own slant and can be found on puredata.info.

0: https://plugdata.org

Not a programmer, but a producer here, and I’m interesting in getting into programming and I don’t know much about it but I want to learn JUCE (and Pure Data; which I know is also available now as a vst! and here’s a link for that https://github.com/plugdata-team/plugdata

This is an important objective of the rapidly-progressing plugdata project! The patcher is based on pure data so you can live patch yourself into deep space with any GP computer (a RasPi works fine), but has a sleek, calm, efficient, and themeable UI. In the last couple of weeks has grown a compiler that is working in its preliminary form both compiling in to C and flashing a Daisy synth dev board. The eventual hope is to gain compatibility across microcontrollers for not just audio synthesis, but for any creative purpose.

The project is here: https://github.com/plugdata-team/plugdata

The builds are coming thick and fast. 0.6.2 is so far behind the daily builds right now that 0.6.3 is going to be an enormous leap in functionality. Tim and the development team are doing a spectacular job of staying focused and cranking out bugfixes and features sometimes multiple times a day.