[PD] Synths! (Please Read)

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

But you can still to all that very easily using [mtof].  I am not  
trying to make life difficult for tonal/MIDI musicians, but its just  
so easy to convert from MIDI to frequency.

Having synths take frequency on the input would remove an extra layer  
of conversion, since almost all synths are going to be dealing  
directly in frequency.  Since Pd uses floats, conversions introduce  
rounding errors, and also cost CPU time.  It would be nice to have  
the synths be lean and mean, only having what they really need in  
them, without making them hard to use.

.hc

On Mar 30, 2006, at 1:57 PM, cyborgk at nocturnalnoize.com wrote:

> Hans, I have to respectfully disagree with you there. Midi notes are
> pretty logical to work with for most situations. Note, that this is  
> the
> case only when you can have fractional note numbers, ie. 60.5 is a  
> quarter
> tone up from middle C.
>
> So, even if I wanted a non-standard scale, if it has octave  
> symmetry, it
> would be easy to use MIDI note numbers. Since a wrapper exists for
> frequency to midi note, this shouldn't be particularly limiting.  
> Granted,
> mtof allows conversion the other way, so you could make the opposite
> argument. But for most math manipulations, it's much easier to deal  
> with
> the math of pitches divided in semitones, than to do the math  
> needed for
> frequencies. If you do want to use some kind of other scale, it  
> should be
> something linear, aka, 0 to 1 equals one octave wouldn't be too bad to
> work with.
>
> The main limitation of MIDI, besides speed, is that CC#'s have a
> resolution of 128. I think that all parameters should have higher
> resolution, but a synth designed to play "notes" of some sort would be
> better off sticking to the MIDI standard.
>
> ~David
>
>> Yeah, that would defeat the purpose.  With frequency, 0-1 does not
>> make sense.  But a standard does.  Like all synth objects using
>> frequency in hertz, rather than MIDI note #s, or whatever else
>> someone might think of.
>>
>> .hc
>
>


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