Hello community!

I am considering moving to pd my performative instrument coded in max/msp, for the sake of mantainability and the joy of open and free software. I face a major challenge. Most of my code is written in gen~, which allows single-sample operations, and I don’t know how to port this to pd, whether pd has something similar to gen~ or what could be other approaches to operate on a sample level within pd. Could you please advice me? Thank you!

Ardore

you put .wav files into an array which is a list . and then you ask for numbers from the array with tabread will give you one number from the list. which they call a sample. etc sample rate...

@willblackhurst said:

and then you ask for numbers from the array with tabread will give you one number from the list. which they call a sample. etc sample rate...

In context of the question, this is not quite revelant.

First, it's about audio signals -- not [tabread], but rather [tabread~] or [tabread4~].

Second, audio objects don't operate sample by sample, but rather block by block.

The question doesn't state it explicitly, but it can be inferred from context that the "single-sample operation" being referred to is single-sample feedback. Feedback always requires delay, and, using normal audio objects, the minimum delay is the block size. This places limits on the capability of implementing filters, Karplus-Strong plucked strings (this is one of the OP's keywords), waveguides etc.

@ardore In Pd, AFAIK pretty much all you've got is to set a subpatch's [block~] settings to block size = 1. Then that part of the graph will run everything by single samples (but outside the subpatch / abstraction window will run with normal block size).

I'm not aware of anything gen~ like in Pd (which isn't surprising, since David Zicarelli says it took their team of paid professional developers something like 6 years before gen~ was ready to ship -- an unpaid FLOSS team is unlikely to be able to duplicate that engineering effort). There might be something that I just didn't hear of...? But I doubt it.

Something that Pd devs might consider is to leverage another similar technology. For instance, a SC contributor released "DynGen" a few months ago, which wraps Reaper's audio-fx dev language "eelscript" into a SC unit generator. Eelscript can do a lot of gen~-like things, and... Reaper devs did the hard work! Might be interesting to have a Pd signal-object wrapper for eelscript...

hjh

Use [block~ 1] in a subpatch or abstraction and everything inside there will run single sample.

You can also use [fexpr~] to run mathematical expressions on specific samples in a block.

Exporting code using the Heavy Compiler will run single sample by default.