[PD] [PD-announce] pd 0.43-3 released

[Roman Haefeli]

Hi Miller

On Tue, 2012-07-03 at 14:11 -0700, Miller Puckette wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Pd version 0.43-3 is available on http://crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/software.htm
> or via git from sourceforge:
> git clone git://pure-data.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/pure-data/pure-data

As always: Many thanks for your efforts!

> I'm ready to start hacking on 0.44.  The most urgent thing seems to be for
> me to go back and work on the audio system (and perhaps tweak MIDI a bit
> more too).

May I ask, what is planned for the audio system, respectively what part
needs some work?

My two cents regarding audio:
0.43 introduced a regression (at least on linux, don't know about other
OS') in that the behavior was changed so that whenever DSP is turned on,
a thread is started, and is stopped again, when DSP is turned off. The
implications I experience with this architecture, is that sometimes
audio doesn't come back when turning DSP on. Specifically, with the jack
backend it sometimes happens, that Pd freezes and I have to restart Pd.
With ALSA, when turning DSP off and on again, I sometimes get this
error:

 snd_pcm_open (output): Device or resource busy

and obviously sound is lost. Usually it helps to turn DSP off and on
again to make sound work again. While this is only slightly problematic
(though still annoying) in a live situation, it is quite dangerous for
installation setups. This could potentially lead to running an
installation without sound for the rest of the day. 

Keeping the thread talking to the audio back end always running has some
advantages:

* The audio card cannot be stolen by other softwares while DSP is off
* A cycle of turning DSP off and on is much faster, since no thread
  needs to be stopped and started
* less prone to re-connect failures as the back-end stays always
  connected
* A DSP off-on cycle can be used to increase the speed of dynamic 
  loading of tilde objects / abstractions (now such a cycle is always
  slow and prone to loosing audio)

I'm also interested to hear if others experience similar issues or if it
is only me having trouble with 0.43's design. Up to 0.42 everything was
fine for me regarding audio. 

> The thing I'm actually looking forward to doing is to extend textfiles and
> message boxes and data structures to be able to spit lists of atoms around
> much more flexibly than now.

Sounds good.

> Also pd vanilla needs tilde objects to do interpolating signal snapshots, 
> phase-syncable oscillators,

What does phase-syncable mean? Do you mean, that the phase for [osc~]
and [phasor~] will be settable not only on  block-boundaries, but also
during a block?

Roman