[PD] Strategy with [pd~] to reduce crackle during disk access

[Phil Stone]

I am finally getting around to playing with [pd~] and want to explore its use in my current system. I’m on an M1 Mac for the last year or so, and am enjoying pretty great performance with it, but there are a couple of processor cores not doing much of anything and that calls for action. 😊

One thing I would love to fix is the brief snap or crackle I get when changing presets. My presets are a combination of:

A [pool]-read ascii ‘situation’ file (of approximately 64 Kb)
A [soundfiler]-read ascii tuning file (50-500 bytes, typically)
A synthesizer preset file, loaded via [textfile], of 2Kb.

Now, I will probably rebuild one or both of my synthesizers to do their work on a [pd~] subprocess. This seems like a worthy idea aside from the ‘crackle’ problem. But I wonder, is that likely to help with the crackle problem? Assuming the crackle comes from a DSP dropout (it largely goes away when I increase the audio delay to 100 msec. from my usual 10 msec setting), will having my sound-makers in a different process likely help with the crackle at all? After all, the final audio out still comes through the parent process that is doing the file work; is that top-level audio just as likely to experience a dropout?

I imagine I’ll explore these possibilities at any rate, and will report if I find anything conclusive. I just thought I’d check with those who understand the internal behavior of [pool], [soundfiler] and [textfile] better than I do before I get my hopes up.

Thanks for any discussion this might provoke.


Best,

Phil Stone
Davis, CA  USA




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