Dear PD-ers,
I have a question on a topic of which I don’t even remember the name. The topic deals with the task of saving cpu by sensing whether a synthesizer is not „active“ anymore, that is, is not generating sound anymore.

Maybe it is a good idea to explain my patches’ overall layout:

 

The main patch is a matrix-sequencer inspired by the old school Tenori-On Hardware-Instrument.

It consists of a 8x8 button matrix made out of [toggle]s. By clicking a [toggle], a synthesizer will play a certain pitch whenever the sequencer has reached the specific position of that [toggle]. The user can choose one out of five synthesizers which is used to play that certain note in order to have some variety of the sound output.

That means that I have five synthesizers sitting in a subpatch waiting for triggers and four of them are actually doing nothing, even I a trigger comes in. How could I detect their laziness and switch those four synthesizers off when they are doing nothing.

The same question goes for a variety of effects which are wired in series and take at their vey beginning the dry synthesizer-signal, modify it and give it to the main out.

 

Now the story goes on:

This 8x8-matrix that I just described, with it’s varying synthesizers and effects are actually cloned using [clone] and by that offering the user to switch between a bank of (let’s say) ten of those 8x8-matrices. By this, the user can have ten different sequencer-matrices running, playing different instruments through different effects and hence create some multi-instrument-fun. 

 

But here it also becomes very cpu-heavy:

1 matrix = 5 synthesizers and 3 effects

10 matrices = 50 synthesizers and 30 effects.

My computer (MacBook Pro 2011, 16 GB RAM, SSD) currently can only handle 4 matrices, with five it starts crackling and lagging a lot. But to be honest: Why shouldn’t it? ;) For now I did not take care of muting or switching the instruments off when their idle.

 

I am happy about any help that you have! Thank you very much.

 

Best regards, Jakob