conceptual inertia

mediocrity at its finest

patch 3

without comments

All right, time to get back at it. I need to tie up a loose end and finish playing with objects found in the Tutorial Zero Video. – specifically, the (pseudo) random object and counter object. I love random. It’s one of the first functions you use when learning to program. Here’s the trivial patch:

randompatch

The right inlet specifies the range, in this example random numbers will be generated from 0-9.

You can also feed it a seed value, in which case you’ll be able to reproduce the “random” output.

randomseed

With a seed of 42, you’ll get the following output: 1, 2, 9, 1, 2, 4, …

Now, the counter object. Have a look at the help file for this object:

counterhelp

It may look a little complex but play around with it, read the comments, and before long, it’s understandable. The function of the counter object is simple, but the I/O makes its usage flexible.

One thing I noticed, these message objects have no connectors!

messageobjs

Hmm…what happens if I drop into Edit mode:

countereditmode

The connectors are definitely there, messing up the joint. That’s a handy cleanup feature, now how do I turn it on in my patches? After a little hunting, I discovered that, once you select a connector, you can go to the Object menu and “Hide on Lock”.

objectmenu

And the seed connector is now hidden:

hiddenconnector

Here’s another discovery, if you’re on a reference page and you click the “Contents” button at the bottom, it displays this monster menu:

referencecontents

Which could prove useful for systematically going through the entire reference docs. However, you can’t open the above window from the home page, you have to be on a reference page, otherwise, it just displays:

homepagecontents

That’s one way to get to the reference pages, but what about the .maxhelp files? How can I see a list of all the .maxhelp object files? You can find them in the following directories:

  • Max5/Cycling ’74/max-help
  • Max5/Cycling ’74/msp-help

Great. Maybe I’ll painstakingly read each and every one in alphabetical order after I finish the tutorials. Why on earth would you do such a thing? As G.I. Joe says, “Knowing is half the battle.” Eventually, after I begin building patches in earnest, knowing of an object’s existence is…half the battle!

Spent the rest of the day surfing the Cycling ’74 forum (about 7 months worth of postings) and watching youtube vids on max/msp. I probably spent one to many hours browsing the forum but I did pick up a few tidbits of info. For example, the ability to cut ‘n paste a patch as text. Simply copy the patch text from the forum post and inside max select File->New From Clipboard. Yay!

As for youtube vids, I found these the most interesting:

Well, it’s about time to digg into the tutorials after poking around haphazardly. I’ll be back when I finish them. Later!

Written by admin

January 3rd, 2009 at 9:44 pm

Posted in max/msp

«
»

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.