Preface

This book will introduce the Pure Data software to visual artists, media designers, and programmers to develop multimedia applications graphically without the need to write codes. Creating interactive multimedia projects is a demanding task. The authoring process requires programming skills in addition to the techniques to prepare and edit digital media content. Proprietary software packages, such as Adobe Director and Adobe Flash are available for designers to author multimedia projects. For the web standard platform, designers can also use the HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript to author web-based multimedia content. Both cases demand the mastery of text-based programming skills such as JavaScript and ActionScript.

Pure Data is a free graphical programming environment where users can write programs by drawing visual objects on the screen and connect them together to form a program. This book will provide the step-by-step details to prepare interactive multimedia content by using Pure Data.

Miller Puckette is the main designer of Pure Data. When he worked at the IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in France, he developed the software Max for interactive computer music applications. The Max/MSP software from Cycling'74 (http://cycling74.com) is the commercial derivative of the original Max. Pure Data (Pd) is the free version supported by the open source community.

Pure Data was originally written for electronic music applications. Over the years, developers contributed a lot of additional features, called externals in Pure Data terms. This book will use a major external Graphics Environment for Multimedia (GEM) for the demonstration. Towards the end of the book, it also explains how readers can add other external libraries to their own system.