PURE DATA forum~

Awesome! This reads really well.  Final example to explain $1,$2 is very elegant.Now we must sticky it. NIce work!

Yeah, this is one of the cloistered secrets of pure data, finally revealed.  I like your writeup and it will help a lot of people out.  this stuff is is especially helpful when transitioning from "beginner" to "intermediate." 

Just to throw my pennies in.   I like to use $1, $2 etc as you said as well; to set the initial values for a nested delay, or envelopeparameters, or table length.  However I also find them invaluable in communication between sub-patches.  I like to break my patches us into modular components, as simple as possible.  Each component only does one thing, and all the control data is standardized and sent about using            [s $1-whatever].  One of my "performance" patches might look like:

[loader a]      [loader z]

[fazor a]        [badrummer z]

[looper a]      [looper z]

This dual use of $args is very confusing to beginners. I would say separate any mention of message substitution $args completely from abstraction parameter use of $args and just make a brief mention that they have two uses. Frank has patiently explained this over and over yet it still comes up as a FAQ. There was some talk on the pd-list of changing this, but it will never happen for reasons of backward compatibility. I think in Max you use # for parameters, is that right?

On tutorial/howto subject: How about contributing that one to the pdwiki Hardoff? I think some of my tuts got tidied up and put in. Instead of long tutorials I might try contributing some shorter FAQ/WTF? I think your example above is a good model. One subject and a succinct focussed couple of hundred words to give just the facts. 

btw: If you chaps want a temporary home to host user written snippets like this I'd be happy to put them on OB1B and we can keep a running link list here until they are finalised into the wiki.

A really useful format is LaTeX, basically

\title{what is it}
\author{who wrote this stuff}
\begin{document}
\section{Section heading}
blah blah blah stuff
  \subsection{subsection heading}
   blah blah subsection of stuff
\end{document}

and these can be converted to HTML nicely

"In other words, is naming the objects $1-whatever and $2-whatever any different from naming them whatever1 and whatever2?"

Absolutley - 1-whatever will not work. $0-whatever works because $0 is special, it gets replaced bu a unique per patch/abstraction number. $n is the nth parameter to an abstraction.

sory jumping in, that was addressed to you Nestor, elaborate for brett with an example maybe, i need my bed.

Last edited by obiwannabe (2007-09-15 06:09:07)

Great!  I second that, I didn't understand this stuff well in the beginning. Coming from a MAX/Reaktor background I didn't get it.  But now I get it and like it more!  Thanks for the concise clarification.

I guess that's what i meant in my previous comment. When you try to use $0 objects within messages, you should "push" the $0 inside. For instance, assuming you have a table called $0-sampler1, the following won't work :

[bang]
|
[set $0-sampler1(
|
[tabread4~]

instead, you should do this :

[bang]
|
[pack $0]
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[set $1-sampler1(
|
[tabread4~]

This way you push the $0 value (which is actually internally replaced by a number) inside the message. Remember that the $ variables inside messages are something completely different than the $ for objects parameters.

Last edited by domien (2007-09-17 21:00:35)

if you follow from my example like this, it will definitely work.....




[0]     <-- bang #1.  right click for properties and set the send as $0-open               
[0]      <-- bang #2.  right click for properties and set the send as $0-play



[r  $0-open]                              [table $0-my-sample]  <-- don't forget to make this!!
|
[openpanel]
|
|              [loadbang]
|              |
|              [f $0]
|              |
[pack s f]    <----  in this case, s = the filename from your sample, and f = $0
|
[read -resize $1 $2-my-sample(   <-- ie, read -resize (filename) $0-my-sample
|
[soundfiler]


[r  $0-play]
|
[tabplay~ $0-my-sample]
|\
|  \
|    \
|      \
[dac~]



if you still have trouble post your patch and we'll have a look at it and tell u where the glitch is.

before finding out about all this $1- and $0- stuff I'd already put together an abstraction for playing a drum sound inside a drum machine. because I knew I wanted several copies of this within the drum machine I assigned "d1" at the beginning of each send or receive object in the drum abstraction, and then did find/replace in a text editor to change it to "d2", "d3", "d4" etc to make several different copies.

Now that I realise you can just have one copy and use $1 and creation arguments to generate further copies, I have tried to use find/replace to replace "d1" with "$1-". Sure enough the replacement operation works, but when I try to open the amended abstraction again in pd, it just opens a blank canvas?!

In the text editor everything looks exactly the same except for the d1 has changed to $1- so I just can't fathom what the problem could be.

Anyone have any suggestions? 

I've attached the 2 versions for reference: 'drum1' is the original with "d1", and 'drum' is the amended version with "$1-" (except you won't be able to see anything with 'drum' unless you open it in text editor!)

you need a forwards slash before the $ sign if you go the textedit route

so $1-whatwhat -> \$1-whatwhat

attached fixed version seems to work fine:

i think it's because the $ symbol has another meaning in the software that pd runs on top of. 

i'm more than happy to help anyone here if i can.  certainly a much better use of my time than visiting music boards that are over-run with idiots being trolls to seek attention.

It's better to use the [makefilename] object for this :

[atom]   (number box)
|
[makefilename /Samples/DM/Boss_DR55/DR55_%d.wav]
|
[read -resize $1 drum1array(
|
[soundfiler]

hey guys,

thanks for that little tutorial.

i tried the example in a little sample looper, but i only get that error:

0-sample: no such table

can someone look inside my patch and tell me what is going wrong?