dan b

Any suggestions? I'm building something where I want to use about 12 instances of tanh~ distorting individual lines, but it's really devouring my cpu.

anything-lower-cpu-than-tanh-for-distortion

I don't know what version of Max you're using, or what computer you're working on, but on my computer 

 is not all that expensive. I know that in theory it's a computationally expensive operation, but in my tests a patch with 1 

 object uses about 1-2% CPU and when I add 16 more 

 objets to the patch it uses only about 2-3% CPU. That's in Max 6.1.7 in Mac OS 10.8.5 on a MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz i7. I tried saving the 

I don't know what version of Max you're using, or what computer you're working on, but on my computer tanh~ is not all that expensive. I know that in theory it's a computationally expensive operation, but in my tests a patch with 1 tanh~ object uses about 1-2% CPU and when I add 16 more tanh~ objets to the patch it uses only about 2-3% CPU. That's in Max 6.1.7 in Mac OS 10.8.5 on a MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz i7. I tried saving the tanh~ function in a buffer~, and using lookup~ instead of tanh~, but it didn't exhibit any CPU savings.


That sounds a bit odd, I wonder if its something else in your patch that is eating CPU. Also check your audio settings, if your sig vector and i/o sizes are very low then you'll have much higher cpu usage.

1 tanh~ object uses about 1-2% CPU and when I add 16 more tanh~ objets to the patch it uses only about 2-3% CPU. That’s in Max 6.1.7 in Mac OS 10.8.5 on a MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz i7

however clip~ will be the cheapest, but you might dislike the sound.

I also once wanted to get something more cheap, but after some tests I was convinced tanh~ is a table lookup(which might be wrong), since it's so cheap. Couldn't get anything similar and cheaper to get going..

@woyteg it's not a lookup table it's the real thing ;-)

:) Which is cool since it's consistent with sin~ etc, but that means that we should be able to come up with something slightly faster using a lookup right?

Speed of lookup may be also affected by interpolation is my best guess. Cool that tanh~ is that fast though.

Hopefully those searching the forum will find this post when looking for tanh~...

Speed of lookup may be also affected by interpolation is my best guess.  Cool that tanh~ is that fast though.  

Hopefully those searching the forum will find this post when looking for tanh~...


Anything lower CPU than tanh~ for distortion ?