Chapter Five
Preparing Patches for Organelle
™
Making Pure Data patches Organelle-friendly.
As was discussed back in chapter one, the patches loaded by Organelle are patches for
Pure Data
(
Pd
), a visual multimedia programming environment. Whenever a patch is loaded
by Organelle, its internal microcomputer actually runs the Pure Data application, which
renders the patch in realtime and sends any resultant audio to the physical audio ports on
the back of Organelle.
A large part of what is happening behind the scenes is a handshake of data between
Organelle and Pure Data. Organelle sends all control signals, such as incoming MIDI
messages, audio input signals, and hardware status information (current knob positions,
pedal port levels, etc.) to Pure Data. And in return, the current patch works with Pure Data
to return text information to be shown on Organelle’s display, the status/color to be shown
on the Aux button’s LED, and, of course, the rendered audio that is delivered to Organelle’s
outlets.
While this might sound a bit dense, we have created a system that makes adapting and/or
creating Pure Data patches for Organelle as simple as possible. This allows your patches to
keep working in their normal fashion, with you lightly amending them to receive and send
messages to Organelle along predefined routes. This chapter will outline this system after
some prefatory remarks on Pure Data itself.
Teaching you how to use Pure Data is beyond the scope of this chapter (and this manual);
learning it is something that you will need to do on your own. In truth, patching in Pure
Data is far more approachable than you probably think. If you are on the fence about
learning to patch or not, a little exploration is almost certainly worth your time.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is now a diving pool, and by reading this chapter, you are
preparing yourself for the leap. Goggles on? Floaties secure? Okay, let’s do this.