Basically what this means, is that messages are only being processed on these larger multi-block boundaries of 512 or 1024 samples.  And that's not good enough for keeping timing tight. 

Of course, the first question is:  Has anyone already made a workaround to this issue???

Or does anyone know of a way to make sure libPd processes messages with proper timing, even with the 'ticks' value set quite high?  

I have an idea for adding time delay messages to clock signals...so that they can be sent through a [pipe] in pd to arrive at the correct time during the block processing. But it looks quite tricky to implement, and i'll wait to see if there is maybe a better solution first. 

cheers, Matt