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 to it. It is released under a license similar to the BSD license. It runs on GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, iOS, Android and Windows. Older 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 seemingly endless 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.
Read more about Pure Data: Similarities To Max, Language Features, Projects Using Pure Data, Code Examples
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