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Is there a way to download a catagolue dump of all the patterns, or some repository containing rle's for ~1000s of different oscillators ?

What exactly do you mean by "all the patterns"? If you're talking about everything within a specific census, you can get a list of apgcodes in text format by replacing "census" in the URL with "textcensus". For larger censuses though, try to use this sparingly because it takes up quite a bit of resources.

thanks, this is useful, i can start from there
I don't really want all the patterns, I just would have liked about ~100 oscillators per period up to p=~20 to train some machine learning thing

It's not 100 of each period, but there are quite a lot here:

https://github.com/dvgrn/b3s23osc/blob/ ... lators.txt

If you want to stop at period 20, cut off after line 4685.