Meter~ Equivalent for On/Off
Hi, I'd like to know if there's a UI object like meter~ that can just display on / off, as in show me whether or not any signal is present. I am working on a multichannel project where I need high level monitoring of lots of channels and meter~ gets very processing intensive. I just need the on and off monitoring as efficiently as possible.
Please advise. Thanks!
objects like scope~ can visually give feedback to distinguish between signals (including a constant zero signal) and no signal, but even they sometimes fail to update what they show when the signal is interrupted. and of course it is quite ugly to use a scope as indicator. :)
a working dead man switch could be [metro] - [snapshot~]... but no, it isnt.
the problem is that... inside MSP objects we are are not able to distinguish between "constant zero at the input" and "no signal at the input".
so taking that in to account, for signals with known ranges, you can add an offset as workaround:
for example we could establish that our music signal or our control signal is usually either constanly 0., constantly some other value between -50 or 50, or moving within the range of -50. 50.
now we make a copy of the music signal for our "DSP LED" and add [+~ 1000.] to the signal - to rule out that the input can be constant 0.
and now we know that if the output of snapshot~ or avg~ is zero, the signal processing has been interrupted or disconnected.
If by "whether or not any signal is present" you mean "if my signal is 0 or not", a while ago I made a small dot indicator. It turns gray after audio stays under a certain threshold for a certain amount of time, turns red when >1., and shows a color gradient in-between.
It's far from a perfect solution but it turned out not too expensive and can be simplified further more if you just want an on/off indicator.
Also it's meant to work with 2 channels mc audio but you can adapt it to work differently, like having one dot per channel if that's what you're after.
btw.
in all cases one can save a lot of CPU by downsampling the DSP part /16 (be it for * 1000 and snapshot, or be it for peakamp or meter...)