If I want to play sound from a table/array named phat_beats, I can do:

[tabplay~ phat_beats]

Can I use tabplay~ to play a table with a variable name? I assumed tabplay~ could receive a symbol, as such:

[symbol phat_beats(
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[tabplay~ $1]

However, this doesn't seem to work. I'm hooking the rest up to audio output of course. I looked at the help file for tabplay~ but couldn't find a definitive discussion of what arguments tabplay~ takes. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding the way variables work? Is there any official documentation for PD that isn't just the patch help files, that describes in a standardized way input arguments / output in a standardized format?

Thanks

Normally the help patch files explain things rather well. In the beginning i found this confusing, but after a while i really appreciated that the helpfiles are actual patches themselves (so you can e.g. just copy/paste things straigth into your own patches). So just open the help again for [tabplay~] (right-click and help) to find out that you can use a [set( message to change the table [tabplay~] is pointing to...

Indeed, I overlooked that - thank you.

I am using libpd to select preloaded samples by array name from the application code, so from the PD end, the solution was simple as:

[r selectSample] <- symbol sent in with libpd
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[set $1]
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[tabplay~]