IOhannes m zmoelnig:
what i could glean from the docs/pdf's there is no way a signal inlet could be used for message-input at the same time, is that correct or is there a hack to get this work? i specifically need the left-most inlet to set the objects state etc. what the standard way of dealing with this in PD?
i don't know which docs/pdf's you are exactly reading, but pd has no problem with the first (leftmost) inlet accepting both signals and messages. there are plenty of externals that do that. have a look at [fiddle~] or [bonk~].
No, this is a real problem. I just made a very large patch that based around using the snd external. And because there is no way (as far as we know) to let an inlet (except the first one) accept both signals and messages, each time I needed another inlet, I had to manually move all connectors one step to the right, which made me not add as many inlets as I wanted to. (There are, however, a workaround, which is to let each even-numbered inlet be for messages, and each odd-numbered inlet be for signals. But thats just a hack.) Anyway, theres no rational argument why pd shouldn't be able to support both messages and signals on the same inlet, its probably just programming time that is the argument against. So this is a perfectly valid complaint about PD. (By the way, a bit different approach to solving this problem is to let message-inlets be placed on the vertical line of the object-box, and signal-inlets be placed on the horizontal line of the box. :-) )