Cycling 74 » Topic: load patcher using pcontrol has suddenly stopped working

load patcher using pcontrol has suddenly stopped working

dhjdhjdhj — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 04:09:47 +0000

I am incredibly confused. Out of the blue, the mechanism I have been using to load top level patchers from a “control” patcher has stopped working.

My control patcher contains a [pcontrol] to which messages like ‘load foo’ are sent. That would load a patcher called foo.

This mechanism has been working perfectly for 1/2 year but today, it stopped working. I don’t know if another patch (or some javascript code) that I saved in one of the search paths but am not actually has screwed something up (hard to believe but I’m desparate) but if anyone can share some insight into what might have happened, I would be extremely grateful.

This is with Max 5.1.9

Thanks,
D

Re: load patcher using pcontrol has suddenly stopped working

dhjdhjdhj — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:39:24 +0000

OK — now I am COMPLETELY baffled. I have discovered that if I append .maxpat to the filename passed to the ‘load’ command, the patchers open just fine.

But I have been using this process for many months without appending .maxpat to the filenames with absolutely no problem.

While I’m happy to have found a way to make this work (again), I would really like to understand why it used to work and what might have caused it to stop working.

Re: load patcher using pcontrol has suddenly stopped working

Ch — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:37:33 +0000

Just a guess, but you probably saved somewhere in one of the max search paths a file (a javascript, a text file, whatever..) that has the same name that your patch.
So if you dont write ‘.maxpat’ explicitly, max is probably trying to load this other file.

Re: load patcher using pcontrol has suddenly stopped working

dhjdhjdhj — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:24:08 +0000

Damn good guess (sigh).

So it turns out that I have all these top-level patchers that represent songs. A song is a collection of routings from keyboards and control surfaces to MIDI synths, VSTs and so forth. I recently added persistence so that when a song is loaded, the previous settings (volume levels, synth parameters and so forth) would be recalled automatically. I have a JavaScript object that does this. The data is saved to a file whose name is the same as the patcher name, but with no extension.

The mechanism for loading songs did not include the .maxpat because it was never needed before. But now that those persistence files are being saved, clearly they were being found first.

This explains completely a ton of bizarre behavior I was seeing recently.

Thanks for pointing this out.