[PD] multiple .pdsettings files? [was Re: Strange real time behavior with pd-extended...)]

[Martin Schied]

Hi!

Roman Haefeli schrieb:
> On Thu, 2009-04-02 at 19:45 +0200, Martin Schied wrote:
>
>   
>> Nevertheless it's very weird and I don't understand why the order of 
>> loading something can be interfering with priorities. It would be nice 
>> to have a place to put information like this  - i wonder why there are 
>> no other people running into these crashes.
>>     
>
>
> iirc, i did run into crashes in similar situations, though i cannot
> recall the exact details.
>
> finally, i decided, that i never want any graphics to run in realtime,
> risking a more likely freeze of the machine without any real gain,
> whereas i almost always want audio to be realtime and also would like to
> avoid graphics to interfere with audio whenever possible. 
>
> since then i haven't used '-lib [Gem|pdp|gridflow]' and '-rt' in the
> same instance of pd and could get rid of such nasty issues. in projects,
> that use both, audio and video, i usually put all tilde and timing
> objects into the audio (-rt, maybe -nogui) pd instance and the gui
> stuff, video calculation and displaying into the video (-nrt) pd
> instance. both talk over a network socket with each other.
>
> roman
>
>   
probably that's what's I'm going to do now too. although it would be 
nice to have the possibility to do a quick visualization of something in 
gem without having to start a second instance.

i already have a separation of pd for "working" (rt) and one for 
"reading patches" (nrt, noaudio) to avoid unwanted crashes - so there 
will be a third one soon...

from there arise some more questions or thoughts:

I'd like to have the possibility to have multiple versions of 
.pdsettings (so changes can directly be applied in the menu and saved 
for future use). For a short period of time I was using some start 
commands copying .pdsettings files around before starting pd but that 
was (obviously) no good solution. Has there already been a feature 
request for specifying different .pdsettings files? like a 'pd -prefs 
.mypdsettingsfile' ? This was the main obstacle for me to use multiple 
instances of pd with different settings. I know that I have the 
possibility to specify everything needed in a bash script for startup, 
but that's always some more clicks and key strokes than just using the menu.

cheers,
Martin