Can I use being~ with a gate~ to turn vst processing off?

dhjdhjdhj's icon

I was just reading about the begin~ in the documentation and am wondering if this mechanism can be used to disable VSTs that are temporarily unneeded?

Ben Bracken's icon

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

-Ben

dhjdhjdhj's icon

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?

Ben Bracken's icon

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

Thanks,
-Ben

dhjdhjdhj's icon

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

Ben Bracken's icon

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

dhjdhjdhj's icon

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.

leafcutter's icon

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.

dhjdhjdhj's icon

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.