[PD] Gating

[Carlos Pita]

Hi again! First, thank you for your
answers, they have been very useful.
But I'm gonna bother you again with a
newbie question.

How do you gate flow, both control / audio?

I think max has a gate or so object.
Writing a patch which treats a number
of cases in different ways I was
in a bad need of a gate-like object
with for example an output selector 
inlet and an input inlet gated to one
of N outlets according to the current
value of the output selector.

I solved this by [pack]ing the incoming
message with the output selector in front
and then [route]ing it (and in case the
selector was a symbol stripping
the list selector added by [pack]
before routing).

Regarding audio streams I find gating
them by means of [~* 1] / [~* 0]
multipliers too awkward, as a few
N gated streams would clutter your patch
with ~ N^2+3*N control connections
needed to send 0 or 1 factor for each
multiplier and them sum the outputs. But
here I could use [switch~] (or derek's
[switcheroo]) and subpatches with the
plus of performance gain.

I could write some gate-like subpatches
but first I would like to know if there
is an usual way of doing the above
which I'm missing, or some adequate
external, specially for the control part.

Thank you again.
Regards,
Carlos