Hi,

In the absence of [cooled~] from the unauthorized lib in Pd-extended (it is supposed to be in the pd-extended binary), I started to create a home made waveform display with a position indicator. I connected the output from phasor~ to [snapshot~] which is fed by [bang~]. The output of this is drivng the 'x' property of a canvas object to simulate the playhead marker traversing the waveform in the array. It works great apart from being jerky at regualr intervals, and Activity monitor shows pd's cpu at 60%+. This is just one! - I intend to wrap it into an abstraction and use 8 or so !

Does [bang~] cane the cpu? A bit overkill for this application perhaps? Or is it the inefficient tcl/tk on os x i'm hearing about? Should I use a different method

thanks

[bang~] runs at 1 bang per block, which is like a [metro 1.5] or thereabouts (depends on samplerate and block size) - your monitor updates around 60 times per second i guess, which is about [metro 15], so you're already 10x overkill...

try triggering the [snapshot~] with a [metro 50] or [metro 100], you (probably) won't notice the difference and it'll use way less cpu

Thanks!

erm I think there is something else weird going on here

It seems that when the array is positioned underneath or below the canvas, Pd is showing around ~20% on the cpu. Move the array away (so they are not touching) and it drops to ~7%. this is on 1ghz powerbook. I have a feeling this might be specific to os x.....

Ive uploaded the patch if someone would like to test it.

cheers

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/pos_in_array.pd

ok I think I might have solved my own problem -

setting the array to display polygon makes a big difference to cpu. Sort of makes sense

yeah, but displaying points is much nicer for waveform display.

the thing is that you don't need to display ALL the points, so the solution i found was to display about 10 points per pixel (if i remember correctly). this requires a bit of messing round with arrays in a subpatch though. first you load your sound into an array, then you make a condensed version of that array in the main display window.

this also lets you do non-destructive zooming/scrolling and all that too, with a bit more work.