Pd-list March 2024

pd-list@lists.iem.at

25 participants
27 discussions

Re: [PD] RIP Ed Kelly
by Dan Wilcox 12 Mar '24

12 Mar '24

Howdy all, I wrote up a little RIP page with some pictures and video from Pd cons 2011 and 2016. A unique member of the community indeed: Ed Kelly and I bonded over computer music and a silly sense of humor. Although I only hung out with him a few times in person and we mainly communicated online over the years, it felt like I had always known him. I know things were not always easy for him, but he would push through with creative energy. He will be missed in the Pure Data community, through which I met him. Condolences to his friends and family in the UK and around the world. - Dan Wilcox http://danomatika.com/news/2024/rip-ed-kelly @Alex: Is there a condolences page to write to, specifically not on Facebook, etc? Maybe we can all write something to show his touch beyond in-person relationships. > It's a great shame, I remember him with great joy, I still remember the > anecdote about the dog. A great guy. > :/ > Jos? @Jos?: What was the anecdote? > On Mar 10, 2024, at 11:18 PM, pd-list-request(a)lists.iem.at wrote: > > Message: 1 > Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2024 14:49:26 -0300 > From: Alexandre Torres Porres <porres(a)gmail.com <mailto:porres@gmail.com>> > To: Pd-List <pd-list(a)lists.iem.at <mailto:pd-list@lists.iem.at>> > Subject: [PD] RIP Ed Kelly > Message-ID: > <CAEAsFmj3zNjSWMqKFcBYBYabd=zfVx-U+Fo7XXybCCrsPorHNg(a)mail.gmail.com <mailto:CAEAsFmj3zNjSWMqKFcBYBYabd=zfVx-U+Fo7XXybCCrsPorHNg@mail.gmail.com>> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > Tehomas Bow on facebook gave us the bad news. He had a stroke and fell, got > injured and passed away this friday. He leaves us soon, just before turning > 50. Ed was quite a fun character, I loved him, he'll be missed. Rest in > Peace. > > * March 29th, 1974 > ? March 8th, 2024 -------- Dan Wilcox danomatika.com <http://danomatika.com/> robotcowboy.com <http://robotcowboy.com/>

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help making sense of [readsf~]
by Alexandre Torres Porres 07 Mar '24

07 Mar '24

Hi, a discussion on facebook led me to revise the help file of [readsf~] and I'm making some edits and changes. It seems it wasn't all to clear how it works, making it seem it would load the file into an internal memory and not just read directly from the disk, and in fact I'm not really sure how it works. Also, the help has been saying forever how one should open a file "a bit" in advance, which is vague and it also doesn't make it clear why and how long soon... it also says it starts reading from the file right away, but doesn't play it until you say so... this is what makes it a bit confusing to people I guess, cause it seems to load into memory. Now, I believe there is some operation that is done in advance and then it adds some latency maybe, so if you do it in advance you get to manage this a bit better, is that it? Can we have and add a bit more information about it? Also, is it the case that this used to be a somewhat significant issue back in the day, which means this has become not significant all for a while? Last, but not least, I can't make much sense of the 2nd argument. I had a look at the code to see what is the default value (which is also the minimum allowed value), something I always put on the help files, and I wonder if this is some kind of memory buffer that we load the file into... Moreover, why would someone need a bigger buffer than the default value? I need this information well sorted to make this help file as nice as the others. Cheers!

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help making sense of [readsf~]
by Christof Ressi 07 Mar '24

07 Mar '24

On 07.03.2024 01:33, Alexandre Torres Porres wrote: > Em qua., 6 de mar. de 2024 às 21:27, Alexandre Torres Porres > <porres(a)gmail.com> escreveu: > > I got this rather old 2013 macbook air, and using it with a delay > of only 5ms doesn't give me any noticeable dropout! > As I said, you likely don't notice it if the file is (still) cached by the OS. You need to test with files that aren't cached! On Windows you can manually clear the file cache (https://stackoverflow.com/a/9649439), but I don't know about macOS. > > btw, 4ms chokes and causes dropouts when testing audio with the > audio-mid test patch, just playing a sine wave... That's a problem with the scheduler. With my scheduler fixes, you should be able to go lower: https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data/pull/1756 But again, you should really test with uncached files and/or with a fairly high CPU load. Christof

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Re: [PD] help making sense of [readsf~]
by Dan Wilcox 04 Mar '24

04 Mar '24

*This* is a good point and worth noting, not necessarily as a "always delay before playing" sort of thing but more a short description of how it works, then a note like "if you experience occasional dropouts on first accessing a file, consider adding a small delay after opening but *before* playing." > On Mar 4, 2024, at 1:01 PM, pd-list-request(a)lists.iem.at wrote: > > Message: 1 > Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2024 12:55:54 +0100 > From: Christof Ressi <info(a)christofressi.com <mailto:info@christofressi.com>> > To: pd-list(a)lists.iem.at <mailto:pd-list@lists.iem.at> > Subject: Re: [PD] help making sense of [readsf~] > Message-ID: <2176516f-edbe-4982-bcfa-b7002952abc1(a)christofressi.com <mailto:2176516f-edbe-4982-bcfa-b7002952abc1@christofressi.com>> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"; Format="flowed" > > Actually, I forgot something important: > > Of course, the worker thread must also *open* the file! If the file is > not yet cached by the OS, this can indeed take a few milliseconds.If you > don't add some delay between "open" and "start", you might notice that > you get a dropout the very first time, but not on subsequent times. > > In fact, if you don't wait between "open" and "start", the perform > method almost certainly blocks. However, often we don't notice because > it may be "absorbed" by Pd's own ringbuffer (= "Delay" in the audio > settings). > > Anyway, I agree that the help needs some more clarification! (Just make > sure you really understand how the object works before changing the help > patch :) > > ?Christof -------- Dan Wilcox danomatika.com <http://danomatika.com/> robotcowboy.com <http://robotcowboy.com/>

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Re: [PD] help making sense of [readsf~]
by Dan Wilcox 04 Mar '24

04 Mar '24

To echo Christof, each object has a parallel worker thread as the file I/O could block Pd's audio thread. It takes time to read the beginning of the file (or from the start point) before it can be played back. IMO the warning / concern in the help file is really from a time of *much* slower media where the file I/O would take a lot longer, especially if a spinning hard drive has to access multiple files in multiple physical locations. Nowadays, speed and (pre-)caching make access times so much faster we don't necessarily think about it except for very large files we need to be able to randomly access. As Christof says, fine tuning the reader buffer size could be thought of as fine tuning the audio buffer length, ie. a 64 block size is faster but has less space/time if your patch does some really CPU intensive stuff. If you don't need super responsively, you can increase the block size. I have never personally needed to use anything but the default readsf~ buffer size. > On Mar 4, 2024, at 12:00 PM, pd-list-request(a)lists.iem.at wrote: > > Message: 2 > Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2024 06:23:16 +0100 > From: Christof Ressi <info(a)christofressi.com <mailto:info@christofressi.com>> > To: pd-list(a)lists.iem.at <mailto:pd-list@lists.iem.at> > Subject: Re: [PD] help making sense of [readsf~] > Message-ID: <93bd5dc6-baa9-4097-ac07-ae7683b75479(a)christofressi.com <mailto:93bd5dc6-baa9-4097-ac07-ae7683b75479@christofressi.com>> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed > > Hi, > >> making it seem it would load the file into an internal memory and not >> just read directly from the disk > The help file says "soundfile playback from disk"... > > Here's how the object works: > > A worker thread is reading data from the given file and fills a buffer. > If the buffer is full, it waits until there is space. The thread starts > to do its job right after the [open( message. > > Once we send the [start( message, the perform method simply tries to > read a block of samples from the buffer and copy it to the outlets. If > there is not enough data in the buffer, the method blocks - which is > something we definitely want to avoid! This is exactly the reason why we > need to wait a little bit between the [open( message and the [start( > message; otherwise the perform routine might have to wait for the > buffer, causing a dropout. > > The second argument for [readsf~] is the size of the buffer. The default > value seems to be 262144 bytes (per channel). In single-precision Pd > that corresponds to 65536 samples, which should be more than enough. I > think this value comes from the times where everybody had slow HDDs with > unpredictable seek times; for modern SSDs it can be much smaller, but we > probably don't care about a few kilobytes. > > (BTW, I have no idea why the help patch uses a buffer size of 1 MB...) -------- Dan Wilcox danomatika.com <http://danomatika.com/> robotcowboy.com <http://robotcowboy.com/>

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Re: [PD] [vstplugin~] v0.6.0 final release!
by Christof Ressi 02 Mar '24

02 Mar '24

(taken it back to the list) > Do you have a suggestion for ambisonic plugins? Here are some free and open source ambisonic plugins: IEM plugins: https://plugins.iem.at/ SPARTA: https://leomccormack.github.io/sparta-site/ ICST plugins: https://ambisonics.ch/page/icst-ambisonics-plugins Personally, I use the IEM plugins. One very nice thing about those is that they can automatically deduce the ambisonics order from the channel count. For example, let's take the following stereo encoder: [vstplugin~ -e -m StereoEncoder 2 16] Here I create it with 16 output channels, so the StereoEncoder will automatically output a 3rd order ambisonic signals If I send the [channels 24( message to [vstplugin~] it will switch to 24 output channels and the StereoEncoder will automatically switch to 4th order. If you want to change the ambisonics order of your whole patch, you just need to send the same [channels <n>( message to all your [vstplugin~] instances and the [send~]/[receive~]/[catch~] objects that make up your "ambisonic busses". (You don't have to do this for [throw~].) Christof On 02.03.2024 09:51, Edwin van der Heide wrote: > Dear Christof, > > Very nice! > > Do you have a suggestion for ambisonic plugins? > > Best! > > Edwin > > On 1 Mar 2024, at 23:24, Christof Ressi <info(a)christofressi.com> wrote: > > > > Hi, > > I have just released [vstplugin~] v0.6.0! Binaries are already > available on Deken (search for "vstplugin~"). > > The most important new feature is /support for multichannel signals/: > a single input or output signal can now contain multiple channels. > This is particularly handy for spatialization plugins with many > channels, such as higher-order ambisonics. Not only does it save you > from drawing lots of patch cords, it also allows you to change the > channel count dynamically! For example, you can now freely change the > ambisonics order without rewriting your patch. > > IMPORTANT: previous versions would hide certain (non-automatable) > parameters in VST3 plugins. This has been fixed, but as a consequence, > parameter might have changed. [vstplugin~] prints a warning for every > plugin that is affected by this change! > > Here is the full changelog: > https://git.iem.at/pd/vstplugin/-/releases/v0.6.0 > > Please test and report any issues at Issues · Pure Data libraries / > vstplugin · GitLab <https://git.iem.at/pd/vstplugin/-/issues>. > > Have fun! > > Christof > > _______________________________________________ > Pd-list(a)lists.iem.at mailing list > UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> > https://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list

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[vstplugin~] v0.6.0 final release!
by Christof Ressi 02 Mar '24

02 Mar '24

Hi, I have just released [vstplugin~] v0.6.0! Binaries are already available on Deken (search for "vstplugin~"). The most important new feature is /support for multichannel signals/: a single input or output signal can now contain multiple channels. This is particularly handy for spatialization plugins with many channels, such as higher-order ambisonics. Not only does it save you from drawing lots of patch cords, it also allows you to change the channel count dynamically! For example, you can now freely change the ambisonics order without rewriting your patch. IMPORTANT: previous versions would hide certain (non-automatable) parameters in VST3 plugins. This has been fixed, but as a consequence, parameter might have changed. [vstplugin~] prints a warning for every plugin that is affected by this change! Here is the full changelog: https://git.iem.at/pd/vstplugin/-/releases/v0.6.0 Please test and report any issues at Issues · Pure Data libraries / vstplugin · GitLab <https://git.iem.at/pd/vstplugin/-/issues>. Have fun! Christof

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