Plug Data vs Architect vs Grid

[Banned]

Hi guys,
are these plugins any challenge to Grid.. What is your thoughts?

[PriyanshuKumar]

Idk about Architect, but I've used plugdata. Plugdata is way more capable, you can do fft processing, convolution and much more. Complex logic is easier to patch in it, and also is less cpu intensive, since it runs at control rate (much less than the 4x oversampled audio rate of grid).

Couple of cons of plugdata include, being less beginner friendly (need to configure patch to be polyphonic, or adding ADSR envelope is not as simple as grid), and it's not as well integrated into Bitwig, where in grid you can insert sidechain signal from any track with single module, or modulate devices in grid's fx chain. Grid is much simpler to patch and get quick results.

TLDR; Plug data is way more capable, but has steeper learning curve. If you feel being limited by grid then look up some puredata tutorials.

[Tj Shredder]

The Grid is not made for complex patches. There is no way to create separately savable sub patchers, thus no practical way to reuse a part of a patch. There is no easy way to deal with events, all is an audio stream, even in the note Grid…
All that is in the DNA of Pure Data (and Max/MSP). But as mentioned polyphony is complicated but doable. I wonder if a future version of Plug Data would come as CLAP, then it could actually rival with the Grid in all areas…

[lilith93]

There will be a VST of SunVox in the future. It also has meta modules.

[Tj Shredder]

Sunvox seems to be a sequencer. Though it has modular aspects, it seems to be less than any of the mentioned tools…

[Tj Shredder]

The last version does come also as CLAP. Lets see how it deals with per voice modulation...

[DRMR]

It does not. Just because a plugin is in CLAP format, does not mean it supports all the fancy CLAP features.

This might become more useful once Pd has multichannel cables released to stable, but then still it will take quite some engineering effort to expose that as part of the CLAP plugin (and it would diverge features from the other formats which would be low priority).

[neurononeuro]

The Grid is not made for complex patches. There is no way to create separately savable sub patchers, thus no practical way to reuse a part of a patch. There is no easy way to deal with events, all is an audio stream, even in the note Grid…
All that is in the DNA of Pure Data (and Max/MSP). But as mentioned polyphony is complicated but doable. I wonder if a future version of Plug Data would come as CLAP, then it could actually rival with the Grid in all areas…

Since Bitwig is behind the design of CLAP, I had this notion that it could turn into a version of Max4Live for Bitwig. Not actually Max4Live, but maybe PureData4Bitwig or some other name. Add that to the Grid as a function and we'd have all the cool granular and FM and and and that Max4Live provides to Ableton. Talk about a true form of competition.

Yeah, I could use Plug Data, but I'm really not into using plugins, I'd like it built-in. I don't find other plugins necessary in the grand scheme of how Bitwig currently functions, it really sounds good on its own. So, CLAP version of Plug Data, but native to Bitwig. Holy cow.

[Tj Shredder]

Pure Data is open source, it can‘t be natively incorporated into a closed software. I would love that the Grid would „steal“ some ideas from Max/Pd though. Encapsulation would be the first, a separate GUI as well. Some sort of event handling. Well, there are a lot shortcomings I hope will be addressed in the future. A way to program your own objects for the Grid would also be an option…

[neurononeuro]

Pure Data is open source, it can‘t be natively incorporated into a closed software. I would love that the Grid would „steal“ some ideas from Max/Pd though. Encapsulation would be the first, a separate GUI as well. Some sort of event handling. Well, there are a lot shortcomings I hope will be addressed in the future. A way to program your own objects for the Grid would also be an option…

There's this Martin Brinkmann patch for Pure Data, called 'grainstates2' http://www.martin-brinkmann.de/pd/grainstates2.zip, and this is the kind of thing I'd love to see built into some form in Bitwig - I don't understand programming, not even high-level stuff like Pure Data, but it sure would be great to have such a beautiful PD sequencer like this available in a native manner. I'd also love to have that Ableton Live granular tool called 'Granulator' as a native device. Somebody named 'pike' on the Discord server made a nice granular sampler, sounds pretty good - not quite as complex, but it'll do.

[Tj Shredder]

You can run that patch now. It would be nice to have all kinds of tools native, but that is too much to ask. We should be grateful for what we got already… Including Plug Data and the Grid… If I need something special, I can build it myself…

[DRMR]

Pure Data is open source, it can‘t be natively incorporated into a closed software.

Of course it can. It's BSD licensed so you can use it for any project open and closed (and there have been plenty of companies do just that over the years).

[ThomasHelzle]

I can't speak for PD, but I followed Architect for years, bought it right when it came out as Beta and sold it a while ago.
Yes, it can do very elaborate things with Midi (it can load plugins that generate audio but the node graph is for Midi only), but with a cost.
The main issue (for me) is, that you have to deal with event order.
The Bitwig Midi Grid circumvents this by basically treating Midi like a modular environment as a kind of audio/CV, so the issues with events don't apply.
But in Architect (the same as in for instance Reaktor) you have to very very carefully set up your node graph, so that the trigger event for something comes in AFTER you set the value it's supposed to trigger.
Sounds trivial, but I had some more elaborate patches I NEVER was able to get to work reliably, they randomly worked or didn't. This may have been bugs, but support never got back to me with a solution.
That somehow takes the fun out for me with patching, when I constantly get errors.
In that case I actually prefer coding (which Architect allows via LUA) but that is even further away from experimenting live...

The other issue is, that Colin from Loomer is a really nice and capable guy, but Architect exploded from constant feature creep over the years from a relatively simple Midi patching environment to almost-a-DAW and since he is working alone and has several other plugins to support, the pace is glacial beyond believe.
It's still in beta AFAIK, has no real documentation and the promised library of hundreds of examples didn't materialise either the last time I looked.

So it wasn't for me in the end.

But it mainly depends on what you want to do. Some people seem to love it.