I've progressed with libpd instead :D
I know that this will probably make things more difficult with complicated patches and externals (I would have to compile libpd with support for these externals if I understand correctly), but for simple patches it seems pretty straightforward. I haven't tested it properly yet, but this small script exposes virtual ALSA-MIDI ports in a patchbay (which I can connect to anything) and just forwards notes and CCs to Pd, and receives Pd's notes and CC back and forwards it out to ALSA:

import mido
# install python-rtmidi from pip
from functools import partial

from pylibpd import *

my_client_name='My Libpd Client'
input_port_name='Input'
output_port_name='Output'

# Open Input and Output ports (Rtmidi)
# Creating multiple virtual ports will create multiple clients with the same name.
outport = mido.open_output(output_port_name,virtual=True,client_name=my_client_name)
inport = mido.open_input(name=input_port_name,virtual=True,client_name=my_client_name)

def pd_receive(*s):
    print('Printed by pd:', s)

def midi_out(*s):
    match s[0]:
        case 'note':
            if s[3] > 0:
                m=mido.Message('note_on', channel=s[1], note=s[2], velocity=s[3])
            else:
                m=mido.Message('note_off', channel=s[1], note=s[2], velocity=s[3])
        case 'cc':
            m.mido.Message('control_change', channel=s[1], control=s[2], value=s[3])
    
    outport.send(m)

# Callbacks to receive messages from Pd:
libpd_set_print_callback(pd_receive)
libpd_set_midibyte_callback(pd_receive)
libpd_set_noteon_callback(partial(midi_out,'note'))
libpd_set_controlchange_callback(partial(midi_out,'cc'))

libpd_open_patch('midi_processing.pd','.')

with inport:
    for msg in inport:
        match msg.type:
            case 'note_on':
                libpd_noteon(msg.channel,msg.note,msg.velocity)
            case 'note_off':
                libpd_noteon(msg.channel,msg.note,0)
            case 'control_change':
                libpd_controlchange(msg.channel,msg.controller,msg.value)
            case 'sysex':
                libpd_sysrealtime(1,msg.byte)

libpd_release()

And that's it! It's quick & dirty and it will get more complicated if I need to handle any type of MIDI messages, but notes and CCs should do for now.
Looks like this in the patchbay:

Thanks both,
@oid I have indeed used scripts before, calling aconnect to list, extract the name of the client/port I need to connect to Pd, and connect it to Pd's inputs and outputs. However in the current case I'd like very much something more modular to connect in a patchbay.
@whale-av thanks, I didn't know about the mediasettings external, this will probably useful in the future. Similar to @oid's suggestion though, this is also about connecting Pd with other MIDI clients from within the Pd patch.

I'll continue exploring the libpd route, but I'll have to learn a bit more about Python's modules management to figure out how to properly install and use it.
Or maybe open the patch in plugdata inside a plugin host...

Hi all,

I've built 3 small Pd patches to fit in my workflow, e.g. to convert one MIDI controller's messages into OSC, one to light up the LEDs of another controller, one to control a pedal, etc.

If I open 2 instances of Pd, each with its own MIDI (or audio, for that matter) inputs and outputs, Alsa-Midi refers to them as follows:

$ aconnect -l
client 128: 'Pure Data' [type=user,pid=260121]
    0 'Pure Data Midi-In 1'
    1 'Pure Data Midi-Out 1'
client 129: 'Pure Data' [type=user,pid=260548]
    0 'Pure Data Midi-In 1'
    1 'Pure Data Midi-Out 1'
    2 'Pure Data Midi-Out 2'

The client name is the same, and the client ID cannot be predicted - depending on which controllers I have plugged in and in which order, it might be any number incremented from 128. The tools that should remember and restore the patching (jack_patch, Ray Session and the like) struggle the same as I do to figure out which instance of Pd to connect to which controllers.
I want to keep these patches in separate PD instances so I can mix and match, and not necessarily have all of them open, and always rely on the specific instance's MIDI input number and output number.

So, here's my question: any idea if it is possible to rename Pd's alsa-midi ports? I found surprisingly little online about this issue, yet I can't really believe that nobody met this issue before...

I've never seen the command line option -jackname to actually have an effect, but in any case Pd does not use Jack MIDI as far as I understand.
I've been thinking about running the patch in a libpd wrapper instead, e.g. from a Python script in which I could specify the client's and port names, but I'm struggling a bit to install pylibpd.

Thanks for your replies!
My conclusion is indeed that I don't really need to worry about efficiency in this specific case

@seb-harmonik.ar said:

imo the best way would be to use an [array] for the button in each [clone].

Oh interesting, I'll keep that in mind for the next time where I'll have to worry about Pd's performance. I'd have to see if I can handle it all with only numbers (while [text] leaves the possibility to also store and query symbols)..

why would the order change? why couldn't you just write each button's info to the corresponding line number?

The mapping between buttons and sequences may change, e.g. if I shift the buttons to cover the sequences in columns 2 to 9 rather than 1 to 8.

@oid Ecasound is a good suggestion, I looked into it a couple of years ago when I wanted to make music on a 700Mhz single-core Celeron. For the current project I need a graphical LV2 plugin host where I can easily map controller knobs to plugin parameters, side-chain audio outputs and easily insert new busses with synths or soundfonts, i.e. basically the mixer part of a DAW (I'm on Ardour for now, Qtractor could work also) without its timeline, or Non-Mixer if it supported LV2 plugins with their UI. I might consider something modular eventually (e.g. with Carla).

isolate a core and run the DAW on that core, can keep the random dropouts from happening

Also a good idea, I may give it a try. Although so far I've noticed dropouts when enabling synths in Ardour, Pd's calculations are probably negligible in comparison.

@ddw_music Thanks for the benchmark and the explanations, very interesting. Sticking to numbers in arrays rather than text is definitely something to keep in mind for future projects on smaller machines.

Hi @oid, thanks for the suggestion (I usually do split audio and control in different patches) but I forgot to mention that I am not processing any audio at all in this patch
And, also, that this patch is only used to interface my MIDI controller with OSC, so real-time performance is actually not really a big deal. So maybe the performance difference between my option will not be noticeable at all.

For reference, the machine I'm running this on has 2 cores at 2GHz, but I'm also running a DAW in parallel to Pd. My previous project was a complete MIDI sequencer, with 24 ticks per beat and relatively fancy UI (moving canvas for sequences progression bars etc.) which lead to relatively heavy load (and low performance), which is why I looked into the [text] topic that I'm asking about here. But I guess that the performance was impacted much more by the continuous UI updates than by the text search

Hey all,

I am integrating a Pd patch with an existing sequencer/looper (Seq192) with an OSC interface, where my patch should convert my MIDI controller's button presses to OSC commands and send back MIDI signal out to lighten the controller's LEDs.
I can retrieve periodically the status and details of all clips/sequences and aggregate it into a list of parameters for each sequence. The LED colors and the actions that the next button press will trigger depend on these parameters, so I need to store them for reuse, which I like doing with [text] objects. I am then handling buttons' light status in a [clone 90] (where each instance of the clone handles one button).

This should be running on a fairly low-end laptop, so I'm wondering which of these approaches is the most CPU-efficient - if there is any significant difference at all - and I couldn't come up with a way to properly measure the performance difference:

1. one [text define $1-seq-status] object in each clone, with one single line in each. I compare the new sequence status input with [text get $1-seq-status 0] so that I update only line 0 with [text set $1-seq-status] when I know that the content has changed.
2. one single [text define all-seq-status] object with 91 lines. I compare the new sequence status with

[ <button number> (
|
[text search all-seq-status 0]
|
[sel -1]
       |
       [text get all-seq-status]

and if it has changed, I update a button's line with

[ <new status content> (
|
|      [ <line number> (
|      |
[text set all-seq-status]

The order in which buttons/sequence statuses are listed in the file might change, so I can't really avoid searching at least once per button to update.

3. Should I instead uses simple lists in each clone instance? As far as I could test, getting a value from a list was a bit slower than getting a value from a text, but searching in a text was much slower than both. But I don't know the impact of processing 91 lists or text at the same time...

TL;DR: Is it more efficient to [text search], [text get] and [text set] 91 times in one [text] object, or to [text get] and [text set] 1 time in each of 91 [text] objects? or in 91 [list] objects?

Since you've gone through this long post and I gave a lot of context, I am of course very open to suggestions to do this in a completely different way :D
Thanks!

I also noticed here..... http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~ich/classes/mumt306/StandardMIDIfileformat.html

Great resource, thanks! that's going to be useful in future (hopefully I will finish my project before MIDI 2.0 is widely available )

@ddw_music's video will definitely also be useful, in fact I'm working on a patch I want to run with plugdata in Ardour, so it's spot on, thank you very much!

@whale-av Oh that's great, thanks for the [makefile] trick!
I've tried again to send the message as a list and importing it in different notation tools - both Musescore and lilypond do assume the default 120bpm when I do not send any tempo message (not sure how I got the 190bpm yesterday, I can't reproduce...), and all bars disappear when I inject the tempo message (either as a list or as a stream, which in both cases just add a line 0 255; in [seq] ). Might be a limitation of [seq] itself.

To make that clear, I've updated the default-tempo midi file in Musescore itself to edit the tempo to 89bpm, exported it as midi (reopened it in Lilypond to confirm the tempo is properly interpreted again), and then sent it via [read file_musescore.mid( to [seq] and again [write file.mid( ... Turns out that the tempo information is lost in the transition through [seq], so this probably just means that tempo changes are not supported by [cyclone/seq] ! too bad.

Looking for alternatives, I've found that [mrpeach/midifile] interestingly uses midi ticks.
But I will follow the sequencing tutorial of ELSE instead, and hopefully [else/midi] also supports midi tempo.

Thanks @whale-av, I actually did that on purpose since I understand that [seq] expects a stream of real-time midi bytes from [midiin].
But thanks for noticing the mistakes in the numbers, I'll try again with the correct ones!

Edit: ah but wait no, I did that because 51 in hexadecimal equals 81 in decimal (just like FF->255) is it wrong?

So, I eventually got to this page and finally to this one, which describes the message FF 51 03 tt tt tt as a tempo change in the MIDI signal.
Long story short, I built a small patch to convert 120BPM into [255, 81, 3, 7, 161, 32( , which I store in [text define midi_tempo] and then send its content to [cyclone/seq] right after [record( .

Unfortunately I still get no tempo when importing the MIDI file to Musescore, and I can see only the first 255 byte in the seq editor (the 2nd line is when I started recording notes after ~6.9 seconds).

I'm open to any ideas!