Re: question on instrument-idle-detection

* Jakobweb via Pd-list <[email protected]> [2025-04-18 21:41]:
> Dear PD-ers,
> I have a question on a topic of which I don’t even remember the name. The topic deals with the task of saving cpu by sensing whether a synthesizer is not „active“ anymore, that is, is not generating sound anymore.
> Maybe it is a good idea to explain my patches’ overall layout:
> 
>  
> 
> The main patch is a matrix-sequencer inspired by the old school Tenori-On Hardware-Instrument.
> 
> It consists of a 8x8 button matrix made out of [toggle]s. By clicking a [toggle], a synthesizer will play a certain pitch whenever the sequencer has reached the specific position of that [toggle]. The user can choose one out of five synthesizers which is used to play that certain note in order to have some variety of the sound output.
> 
> That means that I have five synthesizers sitting in a subpatch waiting for triggers and four of them are actually doing nothing, even I a trigger comes in. How could I detect their laziness and switch those four synthesizers off when they are doing nothing.
Jakob, if these synthesizer voices have volume envelopes you can switch
them on when you start the envelope and switch them off when the
envelope has reached its end using the aforementioned [switch~] object.
I am sure you have looked into [poly] as well, as it is often used to do
voice management for synthesizer voices inside abstractions (usually
preferred to subpatches).

> The same question goes for a variety of effects which are wired in series and take at their vey beginning the dry synthesizer-signal, modify it and give it to the main out.
More tricky, but here you might want to monitor the amplitude of the
effect output with [env~] and use a threshold dB value to turn [switch]
off and on perhaps?
 
> Now the story goes on:
> 
> This 8x8-matrix that I just described, with it’s varying synthesizers and effects are actually cloned using [clone] and by that offering the user to switch between a bank of (let’s say) ten of those 8x8-matrices. By this, the user can have ten different sequencer-matrices running, playing different instruments through different effects and hence create some multi-instrument-fun. 
> 
>  
> 
> But here it also becomes very cpu-heavy:
> 
> 1 matrix = 5 synthesizers and 3 effects
> 
> 10 matrices = 50 synthesizers and 30 effects.
If the effects in all the matrices are identical, don't clone them but
use some audio bus to send synth voices to 3 global effects perhaps?

best, P

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