Cycling 74 » Topic: Weird behaviour of "target" message with Poly~

Weird behaviour of "target" message with Poly~

EMV — Mon, 03 May 2010 20:51:18 +0000

I found that with a Poly set to only one voice, this one voice is always the destination of data sent to the poly object, regardless of what “target #” is sent beforehand. Only “target -1″, “target 0″ and “target 1″ behave as expected: -1 means the data goes nowhere, 0 means it goes to all (one) voices and 1 means it goes to voice one (the only one).

Put differently: with poly set to one voice, data is still received if I send “target 2″ before sending the data.

You can check this with the poly~ help patch.

Is it supposed to be like this? Seems kinda strange…

Re: Weird behaviour of “target” message with Poly~

Roman Thilenius — Tue, 04 May 2010 03:05:37 +0000

did you try it with [poly~ foo 1] or with [poly~ foo]?

[poly~ foo 1] should behave normal.

Re: Weird behaviour of “target” message with Poly~

justin — Tue, 04 May 2010 09:43:46 +0000

i also found a similar situation where sending a message to a target which does not exist (> than number of voices in poly~) would lead to messages still being sent to other voices… even if, as Roman suggests, u add the number of voices as an argument to poly~.

which does seem strange!

Re: Weird behaviour of “target” message with Poly~

justin — Tue, 04 May 2010 10:47:58 +0000

here’s a test patch to demonstrate the issue, archive contains both main patch and poly patch. imo, it would be more logical if poly would ignore target messages beyond its voice count, rather than sending messages to the last voice available…

Re: Weird behaviour of “target” message with Poly~

EMV — Tue, 04 May 2010 14:13:42 +0000

@justin:

Yes, that is exactly what I mean. I just tested it with a voice count of 1. With 2 voices, it seems to work as it should.

@roman: both [poly~ foo 1] and

[poly~ foo 3] getting sent the “voices 1″ message show this targeting bug. I checked that it is indeed set to 1 voice by sending “open 2″, which gives an error because there is only one voice.

Re: Weird behaviour of “target” message with Poly~

justin — Thu, 06 May 2010 18:43:03 +0000

can anyone else confirm? or explain if this is how it should behave…

Re: Weird behaviour of “target” message with Poly~

Ben Bracken — Fri, 07 May 2010 16:41:43 +0000

This is a feature, not a bug.

If you are dynamically changing the number of voices in the first place, then deal with the max target value at the same time if you want to avoid this functionality.

-Ben

Re: Weird behaviour of “target” message with Poly~

justin — Fri, 07 May 2010 18:31:29 +0000

thanks ben.

could u provide an explanation for the feature… when would this scenario be useful? for the moment, i’ve been working around it. just thought it was bit strange!

Re: Weird behaviour of “target” message with Poly~

EMV — Fri, 07 May 2010 19:03:01 +0000

Although I can understand that it might be intentional (though like justin I can’t think of useful applications), it is inconsistent behaviour that is undocumented.

Anyway, thanks for clearing that up.

Re: Weird behaviour of “target” message with Poly~

Ben Bracken — Fri, 07 May 2010 20:34:06 +0000

I can definitely see both sides to this, but one way of thinking about it is if you are sending the target message in the first place, why would poly~ think you didn’t want it to do anything?

With this feature, it assumes that you still want to do something.

Sounds like you have found a suitable workaround. In the end it is a subjective design decision, but one that I’m sure was made a very long time ago, and at this point many patches have been constructed with this in mind.

What we can do is make sure it is better documented, which I’ll make sure happens.

-Ben

Re: Weird behaviour of “target” message with Poly~

justin — Sat, 08 May 2010 11:23:03 +0000

thanks ben

Re: Weird behaviour of “target” message with Poly~

Gregory Taylor — Sat, 08 May 2010 14:38:29 +0000

And the next release’s documentation should make the state of affairs clearer.