metro speed limit

jmejia@gmail.com's icon

Is there any way of getting a clock to output bangs at rates faster than 5ms? (I'd like to sweep between 10 and the lowest value I can achieve)

I'm a little bit confused from both reading the reference manual, and experimenting with metro. The manual seems to say that the fastest bang metro can dish out is every 0.02 seconds. But it also says the default argument is 5ms. Is the metro default really 5ms if metro is incable of sending out bangs faster than every 20ms?

From experimenting it looks and sounds like metro stops getting faster at about 12-11ms. (I have counter on metro, and am feeding a transient enveloped sinewave from msp to create a pulse-train oscillator - I should ideally hear the pitch rise an octave from 10ms to 5ms)

Does anyone know of a way to get a faster clock in max? I want to eventually output the control signal in OSC, or MIDI if it can handle it. (Anyone know the clock speed limit for MIDI?)
Perhaps there's a way to set the blocksize to something else like in SuperCollider?
Thanks!

-Jesse

Mark Pauley's icon

You're going to have to go to the signal rate at some point. Consider
using a pulse-train or phazor~ for dsp-rate timing.

The downside to that is that you'll have to do everything at dsp-rate
at that point and it is a PITA to do anything with stuff that is less
than one signal vector's length, or for example tweaking fft frames
from pfft~.

Once you get over that mental hurdle, and learn to write some mxj code
when necessary, sample-accurate timing in MSP will be your bitch.

Even with this added level of difficulty, Max/MSP is still WAY easier
than say writing apps / plugins with C audio API by a thousand times.

_Mark

Mathieu Chamagne's icon

You have to set "Max Scheduler in Overdrive" and "Scheduler in audio
Interrupt" to ON in the DSP Status window.

And have a look in "Options -> Performances Options" ; there are a couple of
settings you can adjust to your needs.

Mathieu Chamagne
www.maxobjects.com

jmejia@gmail.com's icon

I can't trigger max objects with phazor~ or any other audiorate object can I?
My goal is to get a very fast and accurate clock to trigger note-ons via OSC and/or midi. Is that possible? (by fast I mean accurate down to at least 1ms)
Even adjusting the performance settings I can't seem to get accurate results from metro at speeds faster than say 6ms.

ct's icon

> I can't trigger max objects with phazor~ or any other audiorate object can I?

hi,
sure you can! try edge~, or seq~ for signal-rate max messages sequencing

bye

jmejia@gmail.com's icon

oh great! thanks!