[PD] timing question

[Derek Holzer]

This is all fine and dandy.

But what about when they ask why they can't connect [osc~ 440] to [+ 1], 
for example. Why won't PD let the connection get made? I.e., why can't 
audio go to message objects?

d.

Frank Barknecht wrote:
> Hallo,
> Derek Holzer hat gesagt: // Derek Holzer wrote:
> 
>> OK, thanks for going into it a bit more. Makes sense to me, of course, 
>> but I'll have to chew on it a while and think of a way to communicate it 
>> without twisting up people's heads too much at too early a part of the 
>> workshops ;-)
> 
> Actually for workshops it's easy: A [metro 1] will send a bang every 1
> msecs, regardless what's happening with audio. Nothing complicated
> about that. In Max/MSP it's more complicated, as a [metro 1] may send
> bangs with varying periods of not always 1msec. But Pd is easy.
> 
> Though, even in Pd, GUI messages are treated special: If you click on
> a [bang( message, this will only be evaluated every 64 samples. But
> you probably cannot click the mouse repeatedly with a constant 1 msec
> period anyways, so it shouldn't matter.
> 
> The second thing, people need to learn then is, that most signal
> objects can only be scheduled on block boundaries. So if you send a
> new frequency to an [osc~] as a float message, the osc~ will not
> respond immediatly, as it has already calculated the next block of
> samples. So the new frequency can only be taken into account for the
> next block after that. IIR block here means 64 samples always,
> regardless of block~ size. But I may be wrong about that.
> 
> [vline~] is one of the few special objects which additionally can
> "look into the future" and change it's value kind of in the middle of
> a block (other objects like that are vsnapshot~ and Claude's wonderful
> analogue-envelope generator - and I'm working on making the as of now
> unreleased lua~/vessel~ external clock-aware, too). But this "see the
> future" only works for messages, that Pd already knows about, and
> these are messages that originate in a clock-based object like metro,
> delay, pipe, etc.  Messages not coming from there, i.e. GUI messages,
> cannot be known in advance of course. But as these are quantized to
> 64 samples anyway, it doesn't matter most of the time.
> 
> Ciao

-- 
derek holzer ::: http://www.umatic.nl ::: http://blog.myspace.com/macumbista
---Oblique Strategy # 155:
"The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten"