When I use GEM along with sound synthesis in PD it gets very poppy and glitchy. Is there a easy fix for this?
Any suggestions?

It might help to post the patch. Is your CPU hitting the wall?

What I usually do is use 2 instances of pd one for video that I start with "pd -noaudio" and the other with the sound with "pd -rt".

I do this with Linux, I don't know if it works on other systems.

it generally uses upwards 50 percent. is that causing it?

@morganevansweiler said:

it generally uses upwards 50 percent. is that causing it?

Possibly, pd can only use one core of the cpu so you only see 50% usage, if you use 2 instances it can use 2 cores or 100%.

Even if you only have one core hyper threading can make the OS act as there are two.

I recently played some live shows with a very heavy audio pd and a very heavy GEM patch as well...if your computer is fast enough and stuff it is possible to run two instances of pd at the same time, for me it works fine. I don't know if I would go with this as a long term strategy but it seems to work fine.

Hey all.
Thanks for the replies.
How do I run two instances of Pure Data? I'm using my MacBook with OSX.
Any other ideas on how to get this to work?

Hello, morganevansweiler:
I do not use OSX but GNU/Linux.
There was this post sometime ago:

http://puredata.hurleur.com/sujet-5515-gem-alternative-guis

in which katjav used a bash script to launch two instances of Pd. I paste that part below, which is also in the thread above:

<cite from Katjav>

-That's a good idea to start a -noaudio Pd for the GEM GUI.

OSX does not like to start two instances of a process, but there is a syntax to do it from a single terminal window. As a script (example):

#!/bin/bash
/Applications/Pd-extended.app/Contents/Resources/bin/pd /Users/katja/pd/Slicejockey/SliceJockey.pd &
/Applications/Pd-extended.app/Contents/Resources/bin/pd -noaudio /Users/katja/pd/GEMdingen/draggable-guis/1WaveRefinery.pd

The '&' option does it.

Now you would need a different script for each OS, and even for each user because paths are always different. I'm thinking of ways how to make this user friendly so the patches can be shared without the user selecting and rewriting the correct script.

Say you first open the audio patch in a Pd with gui and audio. On that patch is [ggee/getdir] to find the working directory and the GUI patch. Now it would be great to open a second Pd with -noaudio and load the GUI patch, from *within* the first Pd. There is a variety of shell objects for Pd:
[motex/system], [ggee/shell], [flatspace/open] and [moonlib/open]. They all work different and it's easier to crash Pd with them than get anything useful done, like starting a second Pd. I have not yet succeeded in this. Further, to make it work for everybody, the path to the Pd executable should be somehow found in runtime. I have the feeling that these things can be solved.

<end of cite from Katjav>

Anyway, I recommend you to read that thread so you can catch up with the twin instances topic.
Good luck!

Sumidero

So I've gotten two instances running and my sound and video are working great. Now I'm working on sending information back and forth from (audio) PD to (video) PD.

Any recommendations on what type of sending would be the best? I've messed around with netsend and OSC. Just wondering if there is anything easier that I'm missing.

THANKS

I had the same problem today and I found a way better solution than running two instances of Pd. I'm running Pd 0.45.4 on mac (snow leopard). Pd was using around 40% of the cpu and it was cracking when I was playing around with a Patch running Gem. So I messed around with the audio settings in the media menu of Pd. I delayed the output by around 25 ms and that fixed the problem.

Delaying the sound seems to give Pd enough time to render Gem before outputing audio, therefore, no more cpu cracking and poping!

cheers.
Don.

@Don that is right, but it adds latency in the sound. not always a problem.
Cheers~