Hello all,

Thank for taking the time to read/try and help. I'm a rusty Max/MSP convert who's fumbling away and needs a pointer or two.

I'm trying to make a patch for an art installation foolproof so that I can happily leave it running for a month. The patch needs to stream audio using mp3stream~.

Because I cannot guarantee the internet connection at the gallery I'm preparing a fallback mode where the patch would switch to a recording until the connection was re-established.

The method I have devised is a simple test on the audio levels of the incoming streams. This is 'ok' but the source audio I'm using (police scanner radio) can be sparse at times anyway so the test may bring up false positives when the radio streams are just a bit quiet.

I was wondering if there is something a bit more elegant I could use perhaps involving pinging a server or something similar to test the connection? If anyone's got any pointers and could spare the minute to share them it'd make my day.

Thanks,

Owen.

haven't checked it out yet but i came across this yesterday

http://www.audionerd.com/projects/pd/gyre/

"GYRE :: Loop manipulation framework for Pd

OVERVIEW:

I've noticed a lack of Pd tools oriented toward more mainstream arrangement styles. So, here is a framework called gyre (see: What does gyre mean?) for manipulating loops in Pd.
"

excellent, from helpee to helper via arif's pointer

I gave up trying to parse stuff, string handling was a bit much for me in PD.

In the end I swapped ping for a whois as this meant that i didn't have to parse the reply from popen

Here's what I came up with, bit clunky but it does the job.

If you're specifically after parsing a ping then this is no good, but on OSX and PD 0.41.4-extended this will return whether or not I have an active connection.

Cheers Owen.

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

Seems that it's the same as shell but cross compatible for different OS, I assume it's part of extended but I might have downloaded without realising

From the help file :

so simple it should work on most any platform
always outputs a symbol
non-threaded to maintain right to left execution order
always executes in a real shell (sh on linux, cmd on win (add a bash -c if you want it to run in a minGW/cygwin bash)) so stuff like || and < can be used..

perfect, after a lot of head scratching about string handling and symbols I cracked it using Popen as Shell was crashing PD.

Thanks Arif