On Fri, 15 Jun 2007, Roman wrote:

On Fri, 2007-06-15 at 20:25 +0200, Patco wrote:

...

What about having a static server where we could automatically upload/download sounds and binary files?

i didn't find a (good) way yet to transmit binary files within pd. do you know of any way?

Binary files in netsend have to be transmitted as either floats or symbols.

As floats, the theoretical limit for decimals in ASCII is only 41.5% efficient, that is, a file of 41500 bytes will be expanded to 100000 bytes. However, because of limits on number of digits per number, and supposing we avoid using the dot, then we can only use numbers from -999999 to 999999, and there has to be spaces. If one character out of 7 has to be a space, the efficiency drops to 35.6%.

As hex, you'd have 50.0% efficiency, but because you have to represent this with symbols, you have to put spaces somewhere, else that's a big honking memory leak. If you use 256 symbols you have 33.3% efficiency. If you use 4096 symbols you have 37.5% efficiency. But if you have 4096 symbols in base64 (such as MIME) then you have 50% efficiency.

So far, the easiest other ways that I can think of would be:

• use HTTP (or FTP or SFTP or RSYNC)

• use OSC and modify the [tcpsend] externals so that they can handle Martin Peach's strings/blobs

(I can justify any of the above figures)

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