About
NetPd is a CRNMME (Collaborative Realtime Networked Music Making Environment) built in Pure Data. It allows many users to have a realtime jam sessions with each other, connected over the net. Users might contribute their own netpd-ized patches a.k.a. instruments or use pre-existing ones. The set of patches, as well as the state of each is synchronized between clients in order to provide identical experience for every connected user.
From a technical perspective the whole netpd framework pursues two goals:
- Make sure that every client has the same set of patches loaded at any given time.
- Make sure that any instance of a certain patch/instrument is state-synchronized with other client's instances.
netpd was designed with music in mind, but it might serve well also other purposes, where realtime state synchronization is a requirement.
(quote from netpd.org)
As NetPd does not transmit any audio or video data, we can't say a lot about data fragments, noisegates and other similar things. (For audio transfer there's said to be something called ninjam, which should be worth to be checked out some time soon. So if anyone has experience with ninjam, feel invited to share it in this wiki :D )
Subjective Impressions
First we had some trouble making the connection work. This was due to the use of some out-dated version of Pd, but in the end it worked out nicely with PD extended 0.43.4.
Jamming was a lot of fun, but it takes some time to get into it. A big advantage is the easy and instant connection (once all the problems with differing Pd-Versions are solved...). By clicking on the "pref" button in the chat-window you can change some settings (name, port, chat colour). By clicking on "unpatch", you can add some of the dowloaded netpd instruments to the session. (you can find them in the netpd-folder you downloaded) It's important to load the master-patch, because there you can start and stop the global clock (by clicking on "master"), change bpm etc.
As it's only OSC-Data being transmitted, we had no problems with big latencies.
(further information soon)