Turn off dsp at audio rate
Is there a way to turn off dsp for a patcher, just like [poly~] does, but then at audio rate?
I have had a couple of patches where really fast signal clicks trigger a certain process. To reduce the cpu load I would like to unmute the patch in sync with the signal click and mute the patch when the processing has finished. To mute the patch I would also like to use a signal.
Is this possible in max? If not, is it a limitation of max only. Or is it a limitation that is very common for most programming languages?
I'm just wondering...
in most situation it would not matter if audio can be turned on and off at samplerate, because you can can not control things at sample rate from a message anyway. thispoly~ is a valid example where you could have beefit from it. otoh, a vector often is so small, that you dont really loose much CPU from the delay. and when it comes to turning thing on again, the good thing about the vector shit is that when you send int "1" at overdrive to 2 different polys, they will at least start both at the same sample.
and the approach with the click will fail as long as theere is vectorsize of more than 1 sample, because the signal which contains the click (or the zero/nonzero signal usually sent into thispoly~) itself will only be send to thispoly~ in vectors (and therefore come late, and when it comes late anway it just makes the most sense to reflect it with the first sample of the next vector.)
i hope tat makes sense, i am a bit tired.
Thanks for the response. Muting the patch doesn't have to be sample accurate. But unmuting should happen at signal rate.
Maybe it's wise to unmute a few poly~ patches further than the one targeted. That combined with a lower vector size should work. Something like this: `
Here's the poly patch:
why does it have to be sample accurate?
(and how do you want to control something which is turned off by a signal?)
Because I want to send out pulse triggers really fast. Like in the example I posted. I set the density factor to a 500Hz maximum. But this means triggers can come in way faster than 500Hz. I'm designing this to make some kind of rainlike patch.
But maybe I'll be able to do it with metro aswell. Somehow I thought I wouldn't be able to this kind of thing with metro, because it's not fast enough. But maybe it is..
Seems like metro is fast enough. Silly me. Sometimes I just forget about the power of control rate.
... if muting unused parts of the DSP is too difficult, maybe just dont mute them. :)
Usually I can figure that one out. Even if signals never go to absolute silence I use this near-silence detector to mute poly~ patches:
And if it's a ramp that reaches zero, then like this: