hello,

i want to get an idea of how easy it is to use bela, easily, with pure data patches that incorporate externals - patches like the mutable instruments stuff, or externals like notch and other stuff that i find and make a mess of in my own patches.... : )

i am fairly new to all of this, but have been recently playing with some daisy seeds, coming from pure data through pd2dsy or plugdata, and before that i have used the glorious simple and intuitive axoloti.
i am making artworks where i incorporate sound, to sit alongside my images, which are spark discharges made with high voltage audio frequency sources. trying to bring it all together.
ideally, i want to move towards using live inputs - sending electric signals through materials and monitoring them - to dynamically change the sound, in response to materials. i also would like to have the possibility to use multiple channels - up to 8 like the ctag modules - to create "kinetic" sound works, not just side to side stereo....

my main question is - can bela easily run pre data externals? daisy cannot - they need to be translated and i am no programmer. axoloti is lovely, but limited (and dead hardware-wise until ksoloti comes along....)....
any suggestions would be welcome, and experience of users would be so very much appreciated!!!

cheers,
sean.

4 months later

I've followed the instructions from the above git link but my project does not seem to find the libraries I installed on the bela. I'm not sure where its going wrong.

I'm using a bela with the latest version (v0.3.8h).

The instructions at the top of the git page (https://github.com/BelaPlatform/Bela/issues/621) from my understanding seem to suggest that its just a matter of unzipping the pre-built pd files into a "pd-external" project folder within the /root/Bela/projects directory. Which I did. Here are some screenshots of the terminal and IDE:

I'm specifically trying to use the mux object from the zexy library. So in my Pure Data project I tried to use a declare block like so:

but it didn't work I get this error:

So I tried to just have the zexy directory directly within my pure data project but it just says it cant create the mux object.

So I have tried:

  1. Using declare block
  2. Dropping Zexy library directly in my PD project
  3. I have tried creating the mux object using both zexy/mux~ and just mux~

None have worked.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I think you may need simply [declare -lib zexy] or [declare -stdlib zexy] (can't test right now).

Zexy is different from most other libraries in that it doesn't get built as individual external files (the path to which needs to be added to pd with -path or -stdpath), but as a single-file library. When the library is loaded (via -lib or -stdlib), the names of the "externals" are registered globally and so you should access them without a zexy/ prefix, e.g.: [mux~].

I think you may need simply [declare -lib zexy] or [declare -stdlib zexy] (can't test right now).

Zexy is different from most other libraries in that it doesn't get built as individual external files (the path to which needs to be added to pd with -path or -stdpath), but as a single-file library. When the library is loaded (via -lib or -stdlib), the names of the "externals" are registered globally and so you should access them without a zexy/ prefix, e.g.: [mux~].

  • abas replied to this.