This is a short tutorial on using s-abstractions.

You should already know how to patch using Pure Data, or many of the terms in this tutorial won't make sense to you. A great reference for learning how to patch is Miller's Pure Data documentation.

The most important thing to remember when patching with s-abstractions is that the first argument of almost all of the abstractions is a name. If you don't name your abstractions the results might be unpredictable, and you won't be able to save the state of all of your abstractions. You can name them in a simple manner, for example if you are building a 'buzzer' from an [s-synth~] and an [s-filter~] you could call them both 'buzzer', as in the image to the left. This image shows a basic synth built with s-abstractions which can be used with a midi keyboard sending, on midi program 1.

The s-abstractions use the sssad state saving mechanism by Frank Barknecht. This is included in the downloadable CVS bundle on the download page.

In order to have data persistence in your patch, you will want to create a subpatch called 'datastore' and then use the [sssad/datastore] abstraction to load and save all sssad data from that datastore. Almost all of the s-abstractions use the sssad system by default, so that means that if you load and save states it will apply to everything.

This will store all of your sssad data in a giant message box inside the subpatch called [pd datastore].

As an alternative to in-patch saving, you can save the state of your patch to disk using the [sssad/panel] abstraction. This allows you to save multiple states for the same patch, into different files.

* Midi howto * Timing * Samples