[PD] fun with nqpoly4

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Jul 11, 2006, at 7:23 PM, Phil Stone wrote:

> Frank Barknecht wrote:
>
>> Hallo, Hans-Christoph Steiner hat gesagt: // Hans-Christoph  
>> Steiner wrote:
>>> > I just wrote a quick test of what happens when you play  
>>> hundreds of  > oscillators.  Thanks to nqpoly4, its quite easy.
>>
>>
>
> nqpoly4 is great fun, warts and all.  I look forward to playing  
> with this when I get home, hc.
>
>> Okay, this inspired me to finally do something I wanted to do for a
>> loooong time: I think, nqpoly4 is a very useful patch, however I
>> always found it hard to see what's going on, I didn't like the use of
>> the non-deprecated namecanvas, where a subpatch would be enough, and
>> most of all I found the editing restrictions awkward to say the  
>> least.
>> Attached is a reworked version of nqpoly4, which should be compatible
>> but I only tested it with your many-osc.pd so far.
>> Changes besides cleanup include an additional inlet that lets you
>> change the degree of polyphony on the fly. Further editing of nqpoly4
>> does not need to follow the old instructions about counting object
>> indices and creating connections in a certain order etc. You can edit
>> the patch without such hassles now just like any other Pd patch.
>>
>
> Excellent!
>
>> A final change I didn't do yet is to change the name to something
>> other than "nqpoly4", which I find a bit hard to type and to  
>> memorize.
>> Suggestions welcome.
>>
>
> How about "pgpoly" for "pretty good polyphony"?
>
> I dream of a polyphony object with the dynamic-subpatch-creating  
> advantages of nqpoly4, combined with the capacity to match up note- 
> offs with previous note-ons, which is necessary for live (i.e.,  
> indeterminate duration) polyphonic music.  Such a beast could be  
> called "vgpoly", for "very good polyphony".  :-)  This more robust  
> nqpoly4 object you've made makes improvement and extension a little  
> easier to contemplate -- thanks, Frank.  Once I have a little more  
> PD experience under my belt, maybe I'll give "vgpoly" a try.

nqpoly4 is great for anything that needs multiple instances of the  
same object, not just polyphony.  You can ignore the voice management  
feature and just use it as a way to allocate and address many  
instances easily.  For example, if you use the instance number to  
generate a [receive] or [namecanvas] name you can address the  
instances easily.  Or you can to it in the message format, have each  
instance only respond to messages that start with its instance number.

Its great that its been improved, its such a handy object.  The funny  
thing is that pix abandoned it saying that it could not be improved  
without breaking backwards compatibility.  The thing that I am  
planning on adding is making it behave like a regular object so that  
you don't need to copy it to the same dir as your own objects.  I  
think it shouldn't be so hard to do with [getdir].  That seems to be  
the biggest problem with nqpoly4 for me.

.hc


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