Hello forum,

I am making patches which at the end are going to be used by normal people. Most normal people have forgotten, or never knew, that there once were problems with using spaces in file- and folder names.

For most occasions I get rid of this problem by using [to/fromsymbol]. Now, just by accident, I happen to have a folder with two consecutive spaces, and this breaks the [to/fromsymbol] fix. [coll] will not write to it.

Is there any way to make rock solid solution, allowing the use of all characters the system alows? I don't want the end users to have to worry about this. When something like this doesn't work, it's near impossible for them to know why.

All best,
Dag Henning

Hello there,

Is there any way of grabbing error messages from the pd window, like [error] in Max/MSP?

(Reason in this particular case: when trying to load a aif into a table, nothing happens except a format-related error message in pd. I would like to take some action when this happens. Any other workaround suggestions?)

Hello,

Since nobody answered the "[wavinfo] equivalent for aiff files?" question, I suppose the answer is "no".

If so: what do people here do to determine whether a soundfile (which could be aiff) is mono or stereo? In other words: what's the most efficient way of querying an array for non-zero? Are there any useful command for this, or do I have to iterate through the array?

Hello dear list!

I would love to be able to check an atom for its data type - whether it is float or symbol, specifically. Can this be done, you think?

E.g., [gate 20] gets out ports which are impossible to find individually. Any solution to this? Or should I consider this a design flaw?

Hello,

I would very much like pd midi in (specifically, note in, for now) to behave like the MaxMSP default behaviour "All channels by device". Which means that the user of my patch doesn't need to set any MIDI settings to start playing - the patch takes note in messages from any connected MIDI device.

Is this possible?

Hi!

I'm making a simple vibrato/chorus effect in pd, using a vd~ modulated by an osc~. Unfortunately, the modulated sound is rather steppy. How do I achieve a smoother sound?

I suspect the osc~ is the issue here. From reading the help file, I don't know how the sine wave is made – whether it is mathematically computed, or read from a wavetable, like cycle~ in MaxMSP.

So, should I try and upsample in a subpatch (is that possible?), or make use of a higher resolution wavetable, e.g. in tabread~?

Thanks in advance!

Yes, that seems logical. But how do I add a filename to the folder path without leaving the symbol domain? I tried [sprintf %s/%s], but that needs another [tosymbol], and multiple consecutive spaces in folder names are lost.

Sorry for being a symbolic idiot.

Well, I'm not saving the paths in the message boxes, but storing them temporarily. As I said, the user choses a folder, and on later occasions a file must be written to this folder.

Where would you temporarily store paths?

@mod again: yes, this is the same way my patch is working (other than me using [prepend write] instead of [write $1( ). The problem is when you have two or more *consecutive* spaces, like this: [/path/my folder name with more spaces in it/filename.coll (

Does this work for you?

More observations from my "stupid user" research:

• The only illegal character in OSX, the colon, is impossible to use in file- and folder names, whether you try from the Finder, or from a pd save dialog. Conclusion: no problem here. I suppose it's the same situation in Windows and Linux?

• For folder and file names with slashes in them fetched from the file system, a slash gets converted to a colon while in pd, and converted back to slash going out of pd. This, of course, works just fine only because the colon is illegal in OSX files and folders. Conclusion: no problem.

• If, however, you choose to save a file through the pd save dialog with a slash in its name, you're in trouble. Nothing gets saved. Conclusion: problem. (My end users will not be able to see the pd window warnings.)

Note that my stupid user is never editing or writing anything in the patch. He is only opening a folder, and later my patch will write a coll file to that folder. So the last example is not relevant for my specific use.