greyworld

Im an occasional MAX user, who is wondering if someone could tell me how to improve some of the parts of a simple patch Ive made..

Basically, a mic input is taken, and the peak amplitude is shown on a slider. I do a simple (if its higher than a certain value then pass it on) process. The help file seems to call this if.. then.. "old school" and Im sure theres a more elegant way..

Then, i take the value and pass it through lots of sliders. Every time it passes from one to the next I only pass 80 percent of it.. Again, this works, but there must be a prettier way of doing this instead of all those sets of objects.. I was too stupid to understand how the modulo operation worked (tho i tried!)

Lastly, after a period of no activity, I want to send values to the sliders automatically.. I was going to use a list and then "spray them" but i want the values to arrive at each slider after a delay (so the sliders move one at a time..) Ill end up doing a pipe thing again, but Im sure theres a prettier way..

Any tips tricks to improve my MAX dance style gratefully received!

newbie-would-love-some-advice

Usually if you are dealing with a large set of numbers or multiple copies of the same code (as in the upper right of your patch), it is worthwhile to use lists and/or the poly~ object. If all of the numbers are in a list, you have the wonderful [zl] object at your disposal, and you can step through the list using uzi (with zl lookup, zl nth, etc.) or listfunnel. To step through the list in 200 ms increments, you could connect a metro to a counter, and connect the counter to a zl lookup. This will allow you to grab a single element from a list, multiply it by 0.8, and insert the new value into the next position in the list (you'll probably need to use a couple of other zl objects to do this). It may sound complicated, but once you get it set up it will be much simpler to edit or expand the patch (no more tedious copying and pasting).

You could also use poly~, but that might be overkill unless you think you might want to add more complexity to the patch. Basically, you would treat each poly~ voice as a stage that does the pipe and the math stuff and then passes along the new value to the next stage. If you've never used poly~, check out the help file and MSP Tutorial 21.

As for the sliders, you could use a single multislider to display all of the values, which will greatly simplify things. If all of your values are stored in a list, then it is a piece of cake to send the whole thing, or just a single value, to the multislider.

Thanks so much for your message - thats brilliant. Ill get stuck in with zl and poly for sure.. I appreciate the time you spent writing that, and its a real help

Newbie would love some advice..