Pure Data (or just "Pd") is an open source visual programming language for multimedia. Pure Data is developed by Miller Puckette since 1996 and you can find it on his official website along with the official documentation and other related resources. This is the official "Pd" or "main distribution" and it is also known as "Pd Vanilla".
Think of Pd as a "Modular Synthesizer" that is also a programming language.
Pd's audio and MIDI functions are built-in as well as networking (e.g. using Open Sound Control), but there are a number of external libraries that allow you to do graphics, interface hardware and much more...
Screenshots
Observed history
| App | Change | Version | When ↓ |
|---|---|---|---|
| updated | 0.57-0 | 5 Oct 2026 |
Upstream releases
Release notes supplied by the developer. These dates are not Flathub package publication times.
0.57-05 Oct 2026
The "zoom" feature is entirely reworked, thanks to Antoine Rousseau.
[receive] can (at last!) be set to receive from a variable symbol - thanks to Christof and Alexandre
Many new features added to [pointer], [struct], [drawnumber], etc., objects.
After many requests: logical binops such as [==~] and [||~] now included.
IEMGUI number boxes can highlight their image when activated
[clone] object can dynamically allocate copies at run time.
New [siginfo~] object to get sample rate, number of channels, etc.
New [list foreach], [list join] and [list unjoin] objects.
Button to rescan MIDI device list - thanks Ben.
New [snake~ sum], [snake~ pick] and [snake~ split] objects.
Cut/Copy/Paste for patch fragments now work across apps.
Configurable keyboard shortcuts - thanks Iohannes.
[oscparse] object allows non-standard but widely used "double" type.
The [float] object now can parse integers out of symbols such as "preset45.txt".
MacOs "App ID" and "preferences" storage now under info.puredata to agree with website URL.
Incremental improvements to experimental GTK3 front end.
Classes now have a user slot, "c_data" for storing per-class data.
Updates to "find externals" feature - thanks Iohannes.
Much work by Iohannes on the translation infrastructure, and as always, documentation by Alexandre.
And... at long last, '{' and '}' characters are no longer dropped.
0.56-517 Jun 2026
Fixed a problem selecting MIDI devices in Mac and Windows.
0.56-415 Jun 2026
Fixed a problem connecting with jack clients with ugly characters in their names.
HTML style cleanups for documentation to improve accessibility.
Increased the default buffer size for MacOS from 5 to 10 (and decreased it slightly for linux).
Small compile fixes.
0.56-328 May 2026
Fixed broken "keyup" object (IOhannes).
Improvements to window titles and IEM GUI settings (IOhannes).
Ben Wesch improved updating the Pd colors without recreating windows.
Documentation updates (Alexandre).
Fixed a situation in which Pd hangs when failing to connect to jack device in linux.
Updates to the "deken" ("find externals") mechanism.
Many other bug fixes.