It’s like Mexican wrestling for people who enjoy, um, patching together interactive tools for music and visuals! And on one fateful Toronto day, the open source challenger took the prize.
As promised, a group of music tech geeks challenged DIY multimedia software environments Pure Data (Pd) and Max/MSP to a mano-a-mano contest of wits. These competing patching environments share interface concepts, code, and even a surprising amount of compatibility, but open source Pd and commercial, more polished-looking Max each have their own loyal converts. I’m pleased to offer the results – though I’m already hearing calls for a rematch in this heated rivalry. And there was DIY pong. And some kind of dancing … koalas?
Co-organizer Dafydd Hughes:
The event was a success – lots of fun, good-natured competition, beer and general nonsense.
Pd won 9-6, but several people pointed out that since there was only one person on the MAX team and two on Pd, maybe the score should have been 6-4.5 in MAX’s favour. Before the final Pong match the score was 4-2 for Pd. We then won Pong 5-4 and added the scores together.
We had a really good time and we’re already thinking of ways we could do it better next time and of variations on the theme.
Pictures here:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/interaccess/
Video here:
http://www.interaccess.org/blog/?p=743
A great blog post, pictures and video here:
http://www.nowpublic.com/tech-biz/anything-you-can-do-i-can-do-better-midi-software-duel-5
