I recently discovered cyclone's Borax object (why is it capitalized?), and think that in many cases, it can replace the built-in poly object. I would like to just say now what my first-glance understanding of the differences are between the two externals are, and to verify from others that this understanding is correct.
"poly" has two distinct modes of operation, voice stealing, and non voice stealing, as specified in the second creation argument.
(a): If the voice stealing mode is is set to zero or unspecified, (don't steal voices), then then mostly, Borax does everything that poly does, except it has more outputs. The "voice number", "pitch", and "velocity" outputs of Borax are mostly identical in function to the three outputs of poly. The only diference is that Borax has no limit on the number of voices, but this is easily emulated by gating on an upper limit of the voice number when using Borax. If you do this, then the function would be exactly the same as if you were using poly. So I think that if you can build Borax on your system, you might as well use it instead of poly, because you lose nothing, and gain other interesting outputs.
or (b): If, on the other hand, the voice stealing mode is set to one, then you can't easily use Borax to replace poly.
Is this about right?
Larry