My question was prompted by the fact that Hans' OSX installer no longer had zexy.pd_darwin compiled as a library.  He is now packaging individual externals from zexy separately.  I have now placed zexy.pd_darwin in my extras folder and am comfortable, although as an advocate for other users I am wondering why the change has been made.

Also, thanks for everyone who reminded me that I could load the libraries in each patch rather than through Startup.  I think I will adopt this practice from now on for ease of use for the people I design software.

I am not terribly concerned about my own RAM usage, although the slow Pd startup time with zexy did irritate me slightly.  I do design audio software for other people to use, however, and like to maximize the use of their systems.  I know zexy isn't a big memory hog; I was just trying to understand a little better about how things worked.

Mr. Steiner, awesome job with the Help menu!  That's exactly what I have been waiting for.  When I get some time on Turkey Day when everyone is napping, maybe I will take a look at your scripts to see how you got the nested menus to work right.

sb




On Nov 23, 2005, at 10:31 AM, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:

Burt wrote:
So, what solutions do I have for my problem?  If I cannot put more than ten zexy externals to load at startup, do I need to just put zexy.pd_darwin back into my extras folder and load it?  While creating objects neamed [Gem] or [pmpd] might work, [zexy] won't do anything until I have zexy.pd_darwin in my extras folder.  This leads me to my last question:  libraries and externals (like [z~]) can be loaded through the Startup script, while only libraries can be loaded with a [library] object being placed in a patch, right?

no it is far simpler.
if a library is compiled as single externals (like zexy in the pd-extended) you have a dll (in your case .pd_darwin) for each object.
the first time you create a [z~] object, the z~.pd_linux will get loaded and that's it.
you don't have to bother about loading zexy (as a whole lib, which doesn't exist in the extended-build) at all, as long as the .pd_darwin files you need are in a searched place (e.g. extra/).
that's the idea of splitting a library up into single externals.

I appreciate having all the zexy objects separated to keep the RAM usage down, but it seems to complicate things a bit.  Unless anyone has a better solution, I'm just going to stick zexy.pd_darwin back in my extras folder and load that.

you must be _very_ low of RAM is this is a concern to you.
the zexy.pd_linux is about 148k big, the zexy.pd_darwin might be bigger, but i doubt if it is larger than 300k.

in theory it should be totally transparent, so i don't understand your problem at all. (i understand that you might be bothered by the error pd throws, when it fails to load zexy.pd_darwin; but have you tried to create [z~]?).

the only problem that might arise is, if you have a nameclash (namely cyclone might be a problem); you only have to make sure the nameclashing objects you want from zexy are loaded before any other library; this you can do via the startup-flags (if you want to load the offending lib via startup flags)

additionally you could try to specify more than 10 libraries at startup by using this notation: "cyclone:Gem:toxy" in 1 single slot. (i haven't tested whether this works, but i don't see a reason why it shouldn't)

mfg.adr.
IOhannes