Hi,

I'm fairly new to Pure Data and I've encountered a couple of issues that would normally be very easy to solve (Google) for the languages that I'm used to, but in PD they seem like esoteric secrets guarded by dragons, or something.

So, I have a simple abstraction that has two arguments set as default: the file path and the polyphony number, like so -

[patches/createPoly ../sounds/first.wav 10]

I'm trying to insert a random number between 0-3 into the filename argument, so that it might read -

../sounds/first2.wav

or

../sounds/first0.wav

etc

So far, I have a random number being generated inside the abstraction (as intended), but I don't know how to:

A) Concatenate that number with the symbol(s) containing the full file path, e.g: "../sounds/first" + "0" + ".wav"

Overwrite the default argument ($1) with the new concatenated one

Like I said, this is probably very easy for most experienced users but I've been going round in circles for hours and I think it might be time to ask for help. Would anyone be able to kindly shed some light on this? (Thanks!)

Hey, thanks - that worked!

The random didn't seem to work until after I removed the float below it, but now it's fine.

Maelstrom - I'd considered doing it this way, but because I'm intending to keep this patch as small as possible (it's going on a raspberry pi and then put inside a stompbox for on-stage sample playback) I thought it would be best to create only one abstraction for each instrument's sample (4 total), rather than having additional ones for each of the 10 'variations' of notes (40 total). But, thanks!

So now the correct value is being printed to the console, but I still can't seem to find a way to replace the default $1 with the contents of my symbol. I've tried a few different ways with no success - what would be the best way to do this?