Flashing the goddamn screen on Bang
Hey all,
I'm trying to get the whole presentation screen to flash white and then return to its standard grey color when seeing a MIDI event.
I've been using the bgcolor / reset messages on a huge LCD object and it works fine, but it gets supremely slow and only works some of the time with faster input signals.
Please tell me there's another way!
Pascal
You might want to ask yourself how fast you need it to flash to be useful. Then use speedlim to filter the MIDI data and limit the flash rate. Realistically, 5 or 6 flashes per second is fast enough to indicate a lot of constant activity, 8 times per second looks really fast, and anything beyond about 10 times per second is pretty much indistinguishable. Oh, and you can use the bgcolor attribute of the patcher window itself, so you don't need an lcd.
I previously had an interactive installation where I want to limit how often information would be received into my patch. I had created a (very) crude workaround to solve my problem, but I had never heard of the [speedlim] object before so thank you very much for this example patch!!
yeah, I really like the thispatcher approach. That way you can still use the display, while it still reacts. It's actually a cool performance effect when used right.
@christopher dobrian
awesome. the 'thispatcher' method works far better, and I'd never heard of speedlim.
I should have been a little more specific that I'm flashing every note of a 4-bar sequence, and that by 'faster input' I meant when the incoming notes speed up. Unfortunately I think it won't work in the end because I'm running an insane Ableton file as well as a semi-complex Max patch simultaneously, so there's terrible lag that renders it unusable when it gets faster than a pretty slow rate. I'm realizing this has less to do with my patching capability and more with my processor (running a MBP 2.4GhZ duo, 4GB).
What's odd is that it works fine with a small LCD, but if the LCD is stretched too big or if the whole patcher is flashing, it responds to maybe one every three notes.