hi phil
afaik, this affects every pd (yet) on every os, since this is due to pd's design. all objects i know, that do fileIO (except the threaded soundfiler), do block pd's processing until they will have finished their task. if you have something like this:
[t b b] | | | [read somefile( | | | [somefilereadingobject] | [print]
the bang will be printed only after [somefilereadingobject] has finished reading the file. you are probably going to say, that this is odd, but that is how pd actually/unfortunately works.
the only way to overcome this issue (beside rewriting pd or writing new objects) is to put everything into ram in advance. i don't know, what kind of files you are reading, but there are quite a few objects, that can read and store textfiles, as there are quite many for soundfiles as well.
if you really don't know in advance, which file you are going to open, then you could probably build some kind of an 'asynchronous' filereader patch, that runs in another (-nrt) instance of pd, that passes the data over a network socket ([netsend]/[netreceive]) to your audio patch/instance. beware, that [netsend] is not dropout safe as well, but as long as you only have the [netreceive] in your audio patch, this won't be an issue.
roman
p.s.: it's probably the right moment now to mention, that the nova project addresses such issues.
On Sat, 2007-10-13 at 12:02 -0700, Phil Stone wrote:
Hi everybody,
I'm not even certain this is a problem across all operating and sound systems; it certainly is a problem on my setup with OS X. Any sort of file access has the possibility (*probability* on the first access to a given file) of causing audio dropouts. For instance, if I use [tunetof] to load in new scale data, the first time I access a given scale file, there's a dropout. Subsequent accesses of that same file don't seem to cause dropouts.
I currently just switched to PD 0.40.3-extended, but this has been happening for as long as I can remember -- several versions back. Is this behavior common across PD, or just something intrinsic to OS X or my sound hardware?
Also, is it some kind of file caching that's keeping subsequent access to a file from causing dropouts?
Phil Stone pkstonemusic.com
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