hi,

I'm about to embark on an external-building exercise involving designing and building a timing system and looping envelope editor inspired by the looping-envelopes paradigm that Ableton Live uses.

Basically what I want is the ability to subdivide time into 3, 4, 5, or 7, to any depth, and use this to control looping movement along a function; and I want to be able to do this multiple times simultaneously without losing sync. As a very simple example, I want to be able to have a triplet-based loop that is 1 bar along against a quarternote-based loop that is 1.5 bars long, and have both loops synchronised every three bars. The bar lines for each would come at the same time, but the first would have 3 beats in the bar, and the second would have 4 beats in the bar, and the first loop would repeat three times for the second loop's twice; at which point they both start again at square 0. If anyone's done any kind of polyrhythmic stuff using Live they'll know what I'm trying to say I hope :)

Against this looping grid, I want to be able to both rapidly set blocks of time to a flat value (a la ctrl-2 ctrl-2 ctrl-2 click in Live), and to zoom in on a small section and micro-tweak values (ctrl-1 ctrl-1 ctrl-1 click in Live), and (this may have to come later) be able to switch to an interpolating graph view and edit that instead of being fixed to discrete units of time.

Are there any built-in objects or externals I should be investigating before or even instead of embarking on this exercise?

The specifics of it are fairly important to me -- what I basically want to be able to do is control multiple arpeggiators with non-fixed time intervals on each step, all lined up so that I can build multiple layered polyrhythms that maintain synchronisation. And it needs to be easy to edit in a live situation.

(I am perfectly willing to and capable of duplicating the Ableton Live interface if needs be in this respect (I'm much less interested in the Live audio engine than I am in the interface) -- I already have a broken prototype I built in C++ for a VJ toy based around the WinAmp AVS source code, which rendered abstract visual elements and transitions against a rigid metronome capable of polyrhythmic sequencing -- visual techno, if you will. But it was based on a fairly unsuitable GUI library which I had to heavily modify, and then I went and reinstalled my system without backing up the modfications (as you do), and thus it is all gone.)

So, (apologies for the mammothosity of this email), I'm looking at at least two new objects. The first, we'll call it TimeMachine, will be based around a high-frequency timer triggering at some common multiple of 2, 3, 5, and 7 times every beat. The second, maybe call it LoopingEnvelope, has to decode that raw number and decide based on envelope data whether or not to send out a new message of the form 'float float' that will get passed on to a _line_ object.

How best then to get the timing messages from TimeMachine to LoopingEnvelope? Is it ok to send a bajillion messages every second between objects, or should I be looking at some kind of hacky non-PD shared-memory style technique that forever ties LoopingEnvelope to TimeMachine? I figure I can't just disconnect TimeMachine from LoopingEnvelope and build LoopingEnvelope around delays because over time the start points of multiple LoopingEnvelopes could very well drift apart, especially if triplets or seven-ets start getting involved.