why are poly subpatches locked?

Hans Mittendorf's icon

I work for the first time with poly. Creating a subpatch gave me the problem that it was locked after creating and I still have to modify it. How do we unlock subpatches under poly?

Gregory Taylor's icon

What's inside the poly~ object is NOT a subpatch. You're trying to edit something for which there may be multiple instantiations (as you'd have with a bpatcher), and something that is saved as a separate patcher file. To edit what's inside a poly, select the poly~ object, hold down the ctrl key (macintosh) and choose Open > Open Original from the contextual menu.

Jean-Francois Charles's icon

You mean poly~, I guess.
To open the "in-poly" patch, I double-click on its box. It opens a view of the patch. Then, I option-click (alt-click) on the title of this window. A menu appears, I choose the name of the window. The original patch is then opened, you can unlock, edit and save. When you save, the patch in the poly~ is re-instantiated.
Jean-François.

Emmanuel Jourdan's icon

Jean-Francois Charles wrote on Fri, 27 February 2009 14:55You mean poly~, I guess.
To open the "in-poly" patch, I double-click on its box. It opens a view of the patch. Then, I option-click (alt-click) on the title of this window. A menu appears, I choose the name of the window. The original patch is then opened, you can unlock, edit and save. When you save, the patch in the poly~ is re-instantiated.
Jean-François.

You can also edit one instance in place by using the Modify Read-Only command in the File menu.

Hans Mittendorf's icon

Thanks. It seems that I do not fully understand the architecture of poly. I created a poly object, inside I named it 'picturestream 10'. When I run the patch with poly nothing inside 'picturestream' receives a message. When I click on the poly object, I get a 'picturestream(1) patch, which works. So this tells me that 'picturestream' is not a subpatch. Does it has to be this way with poly?

While we are at this patch, I would like to send a stream of pictures to a jit.pwindow using 'select' connected to a counter.
When I do this, at this point two consecutive pictures cause flickr or jitter. Does someone know how to bundle pictures to stream them like a movie?

Jean-Francois Charles's icon

Can you post the patches (main patch and in-poly patch).
J-F.

MuShoo's icon

Emmanuel Jourdan wrote on Fri, 27 February 2009 07:46
You can also edit one instance in place by using the Modify Read-Only command in the File menu.

What, really? I assume this is a temporary thing, and won't be saved with the patch? This would be very useful for testing, and an absolute pain if there's a crash.

If it's NOT temporary... And I can't see how it could be anything but temp, what happens when you change the number of instances in the poly~?

Hans Mittendorf's icon

yes, that worked! Where do you get your 'tricks'? Thanks

Hans Mittendorf's icon

Sorry, I am not so familiar with Max5 yet. How do we save as text under 5?

Hans Mittendorf's icon
Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.
Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.
Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.

here is the 'top patch':
Here is the inside of poly~
here is the second inside patch
You will see that the first inside patch does not work with the patch when you load pictures but the second one does.

But nevertheless the pictures cant be streamed they flickr.
Maybe pwindow is not suitable? Maybe one has to send pictures to a buffer and stream them from there?

Emmanuel Jourdan's icon

You can edit one instance (with the MRO feature), and when you're happy with the change hit File->Save this will reload each instance of poly~.

Editing abstraction, bpatchers, poly~ subpatches, pfft~ subpatches take adavantage of MRO.

to_the_sun's icon

How come Modify Read-Only is grayed out sometimes (almost always it seems)? Strangely it only ever is for the main patcher in a poly~ and not for any of its sub patches.

Tom Hall's icon

@to_the_sun Make sure you are actually in the voice of poly~

• Double click poly~ to open the first voice
• Navigate to File>Modify Read Only /or Click the Pencil Icon in the bottom left corner of the patcher
• Make some changes and close (don't save) to test the changes
• If you like them, re-open the voice and Save

to_the_sun's icon

Yes, that's the only time I'm aware of the pencil icon replacing the lock icon: when you double-click on a poly~ and look at an instance. But for me most of the time, the pencil is grayed out in the main poly~ patch. I can edit its sub patchers and then save, but not the top level patcher.

HOWEVER, a strange thing happened after I posted here. I accidentally maximized one of the windows that had a grayed out pencil icon and suddenly the pencil icon was gone and the patcher was locked just like normal! So maybe it's all just some weird glitch specific to my computer or something? I've been using Max for a couple of years now and it's always been that way (most of the time that is; like I said, occasionally the pencil icon could be clicked, but I could never figure out under what circumstances.)

Another thing, under what circumstances are you not able to double-click on a poly~ to see its instances? It seems to be another case for me where a lot of the time I can get into it that way, but sometimes the only way is to Open Original.

Roman Thilenius's icon

i do things like that via the OS.

e.g. open /patches/myprojects/project01/lib/poly/ and then you have full control over what file is edited and it is also very easy to open and modify sources.

and yes, the poly~ object will reload its patcher file when it is been overwritten from elsewhere.

-110