@60hz I'm late to this thread but I only wanted to say that your help files look completely amazing, particularly your help-intro.pd! I've taught Pd in a lot of different ways and I can absolutely see that being extremely helpful to new users. well done!
this is a very wide-ranging discussion, but it's great to see a vision of an approach to some of these issues.

oh ok, I got it. pretty confusing to see a different number in that size field! thanks.

I've generally used the sinesum message to create a simple sinewave array without issues. usually I just make an internal message like [; array1 sinesum 2051 1(

however I get unexpected behavior when I try to make a smaller array. for example if I say [; array1 sinesum 511 1( then my array will get resized to 259 instead of the expected 511. similarly with [; array1 sinesum 255 1( my array will be resized to 131.

have I been misunderstanding how sinesum works? or is there some basic math going on here that I just don't grasp?

Is there a way to dynamically change the argument for [clone]? For example, if I have a clone object called [clone synth 16], can I somehow within the patch change it to have 20 instances rather than 16?

@seb-harmonik.ar that's brilliant, thanks so much! so far it's working perfectly.

Each time I load a sound into an array using soundfiler that array will automatically have the "save-in-patch flag" cleared. I know this is normal behavior, but sometimes I don't want that to happen. So is there a way of setting an array to save the contents with a message of some kind? currently to do that after loading a new sound into the array I have to:

• right-click
• select "properties"
• tick the checkbox for "save contents"
• click OK
• click OK again for the other array properties window

this feels needlessly tedious. have I missed something obvious? maybe a flag for when I'm loading the sound in soundfiler? or is there something I can do using the [array] object?

Has anyone worked out a way to get a Raspberry Pi launched and running a Pd patch really quickly? For me it always takes around 60-90 seconds or so, and I'm wondering if there's anything I can do to speed it up.

I'm starting to feel bullied by various software services to "upgrade" my MacBook to 10.15 Catalina.
I remember hearing that as far as audio software goes there were a number of issues on launch. Is it vaguely safe to upgrade in terms of Pure Data nowadays?
From what I've read it looks like the main build is fine (0.51)...I use a few external libraries regularly - zexy, purest_json, and comport. anyone have experience with using those with 10.15?

ah that's too bad, I was really hoping for 130,000 years

but seriously - thanks so much for the brilliant explanation. vline~ seems like the easiest approach. It also occurred to me that I could just divide a very long timeframe up into smaller chunks and run line~ the requisite number of times, with offsets to make up for the resulting output. it wouldn't be perfectly accurate but it would probably work fine too.

oh right yes ok! that makes sense.

I'm looking at other approaches to generating very long signal-rate ramps now...is there a similar limit to how slowly I can drive the line~ object, for example? I've found that I'm able to make it go from 0 to 1 over the course of 2 hours without any issue, but is there a limit to that? Can I make it go for 2 days, or 2 months, or 2 years?!