A Great Investment

Learning Pure Data in general and libpd in particular is a great investment. In a technological environment that changes so quickly that many books are out of date before they are published, Pure Data is a rare pocket of stability. Realizing that many works in computer music are at risk of being lost because they depend on obsolete technology, Miller Puckette designed Pd to be a durable and stable platform, and he started the Pd Repertory project, which aims to port valuable compositions to Pd in order to preserve them for posterity.

In a similar vein, libpd aims to provide a stable API for embedded audio that behaves in much the same way across a wide variety of platforms and languages and protects the developer from the ever-changing arcana of current technology, providing a level of abstraction that lets you focus on the work at hand. Think of it as your insanity abstraction layer. That doesn’t mean that libpd won’t change; both Pd and libpd are under active development, but most changes will happen under the hood, without affecting the API that client code depends on.