Hi everyone,
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. Then you can send messages to whatever apparatus you have for actually processing events and make sound.

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:
1. qlist seems confused when there's no text file - and in libpd (or really any real-time process), writing to a textfile seems meaningless.
2. 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.

Maybe that's okay, and that's really the most Pd-like way of doing things.

But if you were using Pd as an interactive music engine, you'd be concerned about:
1. efficiency of messages
2. real-time performance

Should I assume that this will likely deliver adequate timing and press on with this basic method? Is there any particular advantage beyond convenience of one or the other?

Or is there another method that I'm missing?

I'm particularly interested in this as I imagine I'll be answering this same question with others a lot, and I don't want to endorse anything less than a best-practices solution.

Peter

PETER KIRN
http://createdigitalmusic.com | http://createdigitalmotion.com
PhD Candidate, CUNY Graduate Center
Adjunct Faculty, Parsons The New School for Design