Dear PD Friends,
We are building a collaborative music sculpture, using five Raspberry Pi's to each run a seperate instrument / HID. Everything is very well, they each run a minimal Arch installation and boot up into PD without a GUI.
One machine we are building at the moment, is just a very basic sample player - it has 8 tables with samples, that get played via a looping tabplay~. The machine works by simply muting and unmuting of the different channels - very basic.
Now the problem is that when all eight tracks are unmuted the CPU usage is around 15-16 % - very fine, with lots of room for other activities. NOW, when one mutes channels, the CPU usage starts climbing and climbing, resulting in 95-100% usage when all the channels are muted... This results in lagging/glitching, when one tries to turn on channels again. The muting / unmuting is done through a simple *~ which gets set to either 0 or 1 with a line.
I have noticed others have experienced this problem, but I haven't been able to find a solution to the problem. Hope somebody has a solution, as we are installing the machine at a music festival this week, and plan to open source all patches/sounds/build plans etc.
All the best and keep on patching Halfdan & Jonathan