Joseph Hyde

I'm really pulling my hair out over this one - if anyone has any knowledge, please help!

I'm using a poly~ in a rather odd way. It's not actually doing any polyphony or anything like it, so none of the usual ways of getting in and out of the subpatchers is relevant.

I'm basically hosting 8 versions of a patch, and doing it this way to make things run more smoothly - the subpatch is very processor intensive and using poly this way lets me run the 8 subpatchers on different processor threads. Seems to do the trick!

The issue I have is this: I'm using sends and receives (lots of them) to communicate with the 8 subpatchers. I've been relying on the naming convention Max uses if you put a #0 in the receive name. If I make sure I'm starting Max from scratch each time, this has been consistent, with the first one being [receive 1001whatever] going up to the last one being [receive 1008whatever]. I've been relying on this as in my main patch I hard code them with sends - [send 1001whatever].

However, today this has changed. I've been tinkering with both the main patch and the subpatch a little, but nothing that I would have thought would have influenced this. For some reason the subpatchers are always, and consistently numbered starting 1000, so [receive 1000whatever] up to [receive 1007whatever]. Does anyone have an inkling why this might have changed, or an idea of how to make this behave consistently? I know this is a crazy fudge, but up until now it's worked!

help-with-poly-save-my-hair

I have dealt with this exact issue (addressing a specific instance of a poly~) by embedding the instance number into the name of an otherwise global receive name.

NB banging [thispoly~] will send out the instance number

I shoulda thought of it really (but I suppose the other way was working so I just didn't spare it much thought). I'm already getting the instance number out of thispoly~ and using this for the audio - I've basically got 8 audio ins and outs going to/from the poly~ and I'm using a selector~ and gate~ pair to select which goes to each instance using the instance number.

So I guess I'll just have a bunch of randomly-named receive and forward objects, and the instantiate them with a bunch of 'send *****' messages, where the '*****' part includes the instance number. Yeah, that should do it!

By the way, it must be OK to use send / receive to communicate in/out of poly~. But I would generally avoid using send~ / receive~. It's good practice to route signals through inlets/outlets.

There are tremendous benefits from a design perspective to using send~ and receive~ in poly~ and I've depended on that ability for a lot of functionality in Max5 that no longer works reliably in newer versions. I don't understand why they are not supposed to be used nor why they can't be made to work properly in Max 7

There are tremendous benefits from a design perspective to using  send~ and receive~ in poly~ and I've depended on that ability for a lot of functionality in Max5 that no longer works reliably in newer versions.  I don't understand why they are not supposed to be used nor why they can't be made to work properly in Max 7


Since what happens inside poly~ may happen at a different frequency than what happens outside of poly~, it seems to be safer to go through ins/outs to get a "correct" transfer (the same applies to pfft~ as well). But if you never had any problem with send~/receive~, then it's the most important. I'm not aware of the Max7 problem with this, since I stopped using this pattern a long time ago.

Well, while I get that there could be problems if stuff is running at different frequencies (although still unsure as to why such things couldn't be fixed), in my situation, everything is running at exactly the same rate in my situation.

I'm talking about the arguments "up" and "down". With pfft~, there is a built-in adjustment: inner sampling rate is the same as outside when overlap is 2, but twice if overlap is 4, etc.

Got it, but I don't do any of that stuff either. I just use poly~ to hold lots of different VST~ objects

Help with poly~ - save my hair!