You should be able to use the 'disable 1' message to vst~.

-Ben

I was under the impression that "disable" caused 0 to come out of VST but the begin~ stuff actually stops calculations, which would seem to be much more useful to save CPU cycles. Did I misunderstand it?

It should stop processing. If you are experiencing otherwise, please let us know.

Thanks, -Ben

I have not tried it yet....I have a pretty large system and I wanted to understand whether the begin~ mechanism would work. The documentation for the disable message suggests that a 0 is sent out continuously and the ret of the objects would continue to process that 0 mesage and I got the impression that bracketing objects with begin~ and gate~ would actually stop processing completely.

If that is not the case, then what is the difference between using begin~ and simply using a gate~ by itself which would presumably send out 0 if the gate is turned off

Other objects would indeed continue to process a 0 signal, but the vst~ processing should stop.

begin~ is deprecated, so I would avoid it at all costs. You should look at poly~ for such functionality.

-Ben

Yeah, I haven't quite figured out how to integrate poly~ into my environment. It seems to be a way to instantiate multiple copies of patchers each of which produce single notes. But I'm using lots of VST~, some of which are not only polyphonic but also multi-timbal. It is not obvious to me how that fits into the poly~ paradigm. I don't want multiple instances of a particular VST to be created and the benefits of wrapping each individual VST inside a poly~ are still unclear to me.

I do however appreciate your feedback.

you can use poly~ to load just one instance of a patch. The benefits are that you can load and replace sub patches including VST objects without interrupting the dsp. You can also up/down-sample everything inside your poly~ and you can enable parallel processing for items inside. It's really quite simple to use, especially if you only need one instance of your patch.

Replacing a VST without stopping other VSTs would certainly be very useful. How does parallel processing work if there is only one instance? If I could create separate poly~ objects for each different VST and then have each of those poly~ objects be on a separate thread(core?), that would certainly be beneficial.