Real Time Composition Library for Pure Data

This file contains some notes specific to the Pd-version of the RTC-lib. For a general overview of the scope of the RTC-library please refer to the file README-MAX.txt.

Contents

RTC-lib was ported to Pd mainly by Frank Barknecht in 2006. The port was made without access to Max/MSP directly, but as RTC-lib contains excellent documentation this wasn't really necessary most of the time. To import the Max-patches, the Cyclone importer by Krzysztof Czaja was used, which turned out to be an invaluable help.

RTC-lib for Pd contains almost all objects of the RTC-lib for Max/MSP. A current list of what's still missing is contained in the file rtc-progress.csv. Max-specific objects to control aspects of the Max-software deliberately have been left out.

Where nameclashes with existing Pd objects and externals occured, the respective RTC-objects also have been omitted. So far this only affected the [minus] abstraction.

RTC-lib for Pd no longer mimicks the directory layout of the Max-version with its seperate directories for each section likg Harmony, Rhythm etc. Instead all patches and their help files have been put into a single directory called "rtc". To install the patches, either add this directory to your path and use the objects with their standard names, or copy the whole "rtc"-directory somewhere into your path, like into /usr/lib/pd/extra/rtc and use them with a "rtc"-namespace prefix: Then for example the [super-rhythm] object could be called as [rtc/super-rhythm]. Note that then you may also need to add the rtc-directory to your help path with "-helppath /usr/lib/pd/extra/rtc" or similar, if you want to call the help-files.

Help-files have been placed next to their respective abstractions for simplicity. They follow the naming convention "NAME-help.pd" to give help for an abstraction "NAME.pd". Additionally you will find overview patches for each topic section in the subdirectory "rtc/rtc-help". The main file here is rtc/rtc-help/RTC-Overview.pd (Later this will be moved to "rtc/RTC-Overview.pd", but a bug in the [declare] object currently makes this non-functional.

There is a special directory, "pdutils" which contains some small tools that aided in the porting as well as some abstractions not included in the original RTC-lib for Max, but that are used in the Pd-version.

Requirements

As a lot of the RTC-objects deal with list manipulations there is quite some overlap with the abstraction collection [list]-abs by Frank Barknecht, available in the Pd repository at http://pure-data.sf.net/. Having this installed (without any kind of namespace-prefix) is necessary to be able to use most RTC-lib abstractions.

Apart from that, also objects from the following external libraries have been used:

• Cyclone (prob, zl, ...)
• zexy (sort,...)
• maxlib (???)

Generally if you install the pd-extended distribution you should be fine and you will only need to load the respective libraries and adjust the search paths.

The [play2] abstraction used in several help files optionally can play midi notes with the [fluid~] soundfont synthesizer. If you don't have [fluid~], you can also choose to send the midi output to an external player accessed through [noteout]. See the [play2] help file for details.

Feedback

Please report bugs and feature requests regarding the Pd version to: