[PD] abstractions which have their own memory

Christopher Charles schraubzwingenhalterung at web.de
Wed Jul 5 13:57:07 CEST 2006


Frank Barknecht wrote:
> Hallo,
> padawan12 hat gesagt: // padawan12 wrote:
>
>   
>> Arrays are not the best thing to use for data
>> persistence. Messages constructed using "set"
>> and then textfiles are preferable.
>> Alexandre Quessy just posted a method yesterday
>> that implements a per patch memory. You might like
>> to study the "bag'o'tricks" GOP abstractions to see
>> another effective example of doing this.
>>     
>
> Personally I think, saving state *inside* a patch is The Wrong Thing
> anyway, except for trivial things like [osc~ 440] or so. Anything else
> should go in a seperate file. I sometime compare this to using a
> text editor like Word or Emacs: It isn't useful to be able to only
> edit one single text document with software like this, so you save
> every text into a seperate  file, but use the same program to edit
> them all.
>
> Ciao
>   

hi
well, i have to disagree there. i don't see any objections to a mixed 
code/state file. if you only have one fixed synth (or whatever) patch 
with fixed effect-routes (as monolithic as word or emacs), then keeping 
the state in different files makes sense, but if you have a patch with a 
bunch of small modules/abstractions which can be chained in various 
ways, then the way they are chained (the order of the abstractions) is 
imo part of the state, too. most of my bagoftricks patches look 
radically different and i don't save copies of them with only some 
parameters changed. another bonus for me is ease of use, with clicking 
pd's save button, i save exactly what i'm working on at the moment, when 
i load it up later, it sounds the same. only one file to take care of. 
if you look around at the various music softwares around, you'll notice 
that their behaviour is very similar to this.
an application of seperate file-statesaving within the realm of single 
file patches is the use of presets for single modules. i don't want to 
say one way of state saving is per se better than another, but it often 
depends on what kind of patches you use to determine which way is better 
suited.

charlie




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