[PD] audio glitch/pause while redrawing array

Mathieu Bouchard matju at sympatico.ca
Mon Jul 5 19:03:44 CEST 2004


On Mon, 5 Jul 2004, david daniell wrote:

> Ok so I understand why the redrawing of arrays is so slow.... it seems 
> like there's no data reduction in the redraw process, so for instance 
> if I have an array that's 10 seconds long @ 44100 hz, it runs through 
> all 441,000 data points in the rendering of the array on-screen.  So, 
> of course there's a slow-down for that.  But is there any way to impose 
> some sort of data-reduction in the visual rendering of the arrays?

Well, I have reviewed most of that code (g_array.c), with the intent of
reorganizing and/or partially rewriting later, but that was a few months
ago.

I recall there's something that, beyond a certain array size (2000?) picks
up only 300 values in the array for the redraw. So IMHO the problem is not
there.

The biggest bandwidth problem from the array editor, is that when
refreshing the array's waveform, it resends all of the viewable
values. Even if that's limited to 300, if it's to be done several times a
second, it sucks bandwidth like mad, especially if that's transmitted as a
Tcl "line coords" command with no possible way for the Tcl side to decide
how/if/when to redraw it.

What I want is: modified array data must be sent as a diff; Tcl side
stores a data-reduced version of the array at all times (level of
indirection) and/or shared memory is used (if possible); Tcl side renders
when it wants to, based on received notifications of modifications; Tcl
side gets several rendering options, instead of just one big "create
line"; my intuition tells me that joining several "create line" might help
with redraw speeds (?) ... well at least when array-editing.

> So perhaps there would be some way to modify the array-drawing code to
> skip samples in the drawing process and only the minimum required to
> display the data?

The "2000" and "300" constants mentioned above should be automatically
adjusting in a smarter way... and then manually adjustable a bit.

________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard                       http://artengine.ca/matju





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