On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 08:30:00AM -0500, Peter Kirn wrote:
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You accidently had html-mail switched on. :)
Thanks for the feedback on the timing discussion; I do feel that was useful. At some point, it may even be worth writing up a canonical answer there, alongside some tests. This still leaves me puzzling over some questions, though, in terms of sequencing events in real time - forgetting, for a moment, even those timing implications.
Let's imagine you have an interface scheduling events from another language, and Pd as an engine (increasingly common with libpd) processing those events.
textfile and qlist each do this, qlist tending to be the more convenient.
In this context qlist and textfile are eqivalent: qlist is just a textfile with a metro/delay and a sender already built in. Both objects do things inside of Pd and the metros work with subsample accuracy. I don't think, you can take them as a model for communication with external processes: Once the file is loaded into a textfile's or qlist's memory, there's no communication with the outside world (network, harddisk, other processes) happening anymore.
I think, a better model for realtime interaction might by OSC with timetags.
But what would be the most efficient way to send events to those objects for future scheduling?
qlist seems to be built for the purpose, but two issues:
- qlist seems confused when there's no text file - and in libpd (or really any real-time process), writing to a textfile seems meaningless.
- qlist would require sending every event - not an entire sequence - one at a time, since it can't process lists.
With textfile, I can add a list, but then the list gets stored entirely as one message - which means to iterate through the list, I have to again split it into individual items.
qlist can send lists just fine. Both qlist and a textfile with sender/outlet and metro-timing simply send Pd messages like floats, symbols, lists, etc. It's up to the composer to define, what's describing an event and what describes a sequence.
Ciao
Frank Barknecht Do You RjDj.me? _ ______footils.org__