[PD] poly vs. cyclone's Borax

Larry Troxler lt at westnet.com
Tue Apr 13 03:00:56 CEST 2004


I recently discovered cyclone's Borax object (why is it capitalized?), and 
think that in many cases, it can replace the built-in poly object. I would 
like to just say now what my first-glance understanding of the differences 
are between the two externals are, and to verify from others that this 
understanding is correct.

"poly" has two distinct modes of operation, voice stealing, and non voice 
stealing, as specified in the second creation argument.

(a): If the voice stealing mode is is set to zero or unspecified, (don't steal 
voices),  then then mostly, Borax does everything that poly does, except it 
has more outputs. The "voice number", "pitch", and "velocity" outputs of 
Borax are mostly identical in function to the three outputs of poly. The only 
diference is that Borax has no limit on the number of voices, but this is 
easily emulated by gating on an upper limit of the voice number when using 
Borax. If you do this, then the function would be exactly the same as if you 
were using poly. So I think that if you can build Borax on your system, you 
might as well use it instead of poly, because you lose nothing, and gain 
other interesting outputs.

or (b): If, on the other hand, the voice stealing mode is set to one, then you 
can't easily use Borax to replace poly.

Is this about right?

Larry








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