Efficient OSC routing

Hi all,

Well after a solid week of experimenting, learning, reading, experimenting, grinning, noting, swearing and then grinning again I have got to the point where I'm feeling pretty comfortable working with Max in a general sense. A sure sign I'm progressing is an increasing awareness of how little I know so far!

I'm working on an application which will be making heavy use of OSC and MIDI. For clarity in my patch I've created subpatches for the following:

- Sending OSC
- Receiving OSC
- Sending MIDI
- Receiving MIDI
- Several '1 inlet, multiple outlet' subpatches that encapsulate related blocks of 'route' objects to filter by OSC input parameters
- Several '1 outlet, multiple inlet' subpatches that encapsulate related blocks of 'prepend' objects to insert various slider/knob values into outgoing OSC messages
- As above, but using message boxes to form MIDI SysEx strings (which are lists of integers - 'strings' is the MIDI terminology not a datatype in this context)

So far it's actually looking pretty nice to me, and it's working wonderfully.

Given that the scope of this project is actually fairly large, and I anticipate that I will end up with a patch (containing a lot of subpatches) that will be dealing with hundreds, if not thousands, of OSC messages I was wondering two things:

1) Is the use of multiple 'route' objects the best way to handle an OSC input stream (coming in over updreceive) or is there a more advanced database/internal data structure method that I can use for some kind of lookup table, and should be studying in order to make use of it before I get too far?

2) After various internal processing, the patch needs to spit out MIDI SysEx strings with custom values embedded in them. A SysEx string is essentially a list of integers, typically 10-12 items long. 90% of the time, the SysEx strings consist of a fixed set of integers and I only have to vary 2 or 3 values in that list depending on the source of the value I'm inserting into it. Currently I'm using lots of message boxes with $1, $2 etc. placeholders to do this. Related to the first question above I guess - is there a better way to do this that you can point me in the direction of?

To put that second question another way, if I had 500 sliders and when I move any given slider I wanted to generate an integer list of the form: (n, n, n, number_of_slider, n, value_of_slider, n, n) where 'n' is a fixed integer, is there a better way than to insert a message box after each individual slider with the fixed values and $ variables supplied to it for the 'value' and 'number' members of the list?

The reference to paranoia in my message title is to do with a concern that performance/throughput may drop if I end up putting hundreds of 'prepend' ' route' and 'message' boxes across all the data routes.

I'm not after anyone doing the work for me, I'm pretty self-sufficient generally. I would just appreciate the benefit of your experience and a pointer or two to a relevant documentation section if you've come across this kind of application before!

Many thanks,

Eddy

The below is a simple example of one of the subpatches I'm talking about in my second question. The inlets would all be fed by individual sliders, each outputting a value from 0-127 in this example.