On Wed, Jul 05, 2006 at 04:51:26PM +0200, Frank Barknecht wrote:
Hallo, Christopher Charles hat gesagt: // Christopher Charles wrote:
most of my bagoftricks patches look radically different and i don't save copies of them with only some parameters changed. another bonus for me is ease of use, with clicking pd's save button, i save exactly what i'm working on at the moment, when i load it up later, it sounds the same. only one file to take care of.
Of course to each his own, but pressing a different "SAVE" to save the patch than to save the current state of the variable in my patch is no problem for me.
Sure, that is a really good way of working, but not everybody wants to patch like that. In my opinion if puredata had the following features then it would make it a lot easier to make patches that save their own state within the main .pd file and still be able to use abstractions for modularity, which is the way some people like to work.
[parentname] which when banged gives the name of the parent patch.
[savebang] which bangs each time ctrl-s is hit or "save" is selected
from the menu.
This would enable GOP abstraction units to save their internal data to the parent patch (or a sub-patch of the parent patch) whenever the patch is saved.
At the moment you are forced to work in the Frank B way; make lots of virtual machines that save their state to a file collectively or individually, and can have multiple states for one "virtual audio machine" configuration, or the Hans Steiner/Solitude way; make a big patch which uses data structures to save it's state/score but can't really use abstractions meaningfully within that framework.
They way I like to work, and obviously some others too, is for each patch to be a self contained score and instrument, but to have the re-use of abstractions available. This is currently pretty difficult, so I use [sssad] to save state (thanks for that!). It would be nice to be able to build something that allowed for this alternative.
Best,
Chris.
chris@mccormick.cx http://mccormick.cx