Book Image

Multimedia Programming with Pure Data

By : Bryan, Wai-ching CHUNG
Book Image

Multimedia Programming with Pure Data

By: Bryan, Wai-ching CHUNG

Overview of this book

Preparing interactive displays, creating computer games, and conducting audio-visual performance are now achievable without typing lines of code. With Pure Data, a graphical programming environment, creating interactive multimedia applications is just visually connecting graphical icons together. It is straightforward, intuitive, and effective. "Multimedia Programming with Pure Data" will show you how to create interactive multimedia applications. You will learn how to author various digital media, such as images, animations, audio, and videos together to form a coherent title. From simple to sophisticated interaction techniques, you will learn to apply these techniques in your practical multimedia projects. You start from making 2D and 3D computer graphics and proceed to animation, multimedia presentation, interface design, and more sophisticated computer vision applications with interactivity. With Pure Data and GEM, you will learn to produce animations with 2D digital imagery, 3D modelling, and particle systems. You can also design graphical interfaces, and use live video for motion tracking applications. Furthermore, you will learn Audio signal processing, which forms the key aspect to multimedia content creation. Last but not least, Network programming using Pure Data extension libraries explores applications to other portable devices.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Multimedia Programming with Pure Data
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating the first program


Every Pure Data program is a text file with an extension (.pd). In Pure Data's term, a program is called a patch. Electronic musicians often use cables to connect different devices to produce sound. The cables are referred as patch cables. Since Pure Data is originally a piece of software to produce electronic music, the name patch refers to a Pure Data program.

To create a new patch, navigate to File | New to make an empty patch. From the menu, choose File | Save to save the patch in the folder you plan to store your Pure Data material. Pure Data does not assume a default location for your patches. You can decide where to put them.

At this point, you will have an empty window with a cursor that appears to be a finger pointing to the left. Before we proceed to the notorious Hello World example, we need to go through the Pure Data interface first.