Making an "event sequencer" for a project. Events come in as tag / value pairs, such as "distortion 0.75", "reverb_onOff 1", etc

the timing of these events is tracked, 256 steps per loop.

so, need to make some sort of container that can be filled with these tag / value pairs, going into the appropriate step slot.

For example, on step 156, there might be movement of the GUI for both "distortion" and "reverb_onOff", so both those events should go into step 156 slot.

a final structure might look something like this:

step156 distortion 0.75
step156 reverb_onOff 1
step157 blank
step158 blank
step159 reverb_onOff 0
step159 chorus 0.23

etc,

Any ideas on a way to do this, preferably in vanilla pd, but perhaps open to externals if they may do it better?

@mod Check out the help documentation for the {text} object. (assuming you're using the newest Pd vanilla)

[text] has a lot (or perhaps all?) of the same functionality as the older {qlist] object, but there are many more ways of inputting/outputting/loading/saving content. The help doc has subpatches which demonstrate the various functionality. ({text define], [text set], [text sequence], etc.)

I have seen external libraries which have a lot of sequencer-oriented abstractions, but I haven't personally combed through them enough to know whether there's a simpler solution for your use case.

If the hassle is tolerable, you could use a single table and some sort of coding scheme. So you could fill the table with float values, the fractional part of each could represent a tag and the integer part could store a value.

if you have 100 tags and value resolution of 100 values,

74.23 would represent the 23rd tag, and a value of 75% (adapt from 0-99) edit; ah, this isn't quite right, if 0 is true)

There are probably better coding schemes than this. something bitwise maybe, but if pd is already storing floats in the table...

It's not a flexible method but nice and simple if appropriate

edit 2: ah, just read your post more thoroughly re multiple tags on step 156 - nevermind!

If you are adding commands sequentially (live) your best bet might be to record them in a [text] and at each step record how many events there were at that step in an array. Then every step that you want to read events read the step # from the array and read that many commands from the text. Instead of a normal counter you would increment by how many commands are currently stored at the current step in the text/current # at that index (in order to get the next position in the text).

@mod Here is a way to do it with [text]: event-sequencer.pd
There is also [text sequence] which could probably also do it and maybe nicer.

@ingox Nice! I've added a little mechanism to the output which separates the different messages into pairs so they can be sent to their relative destinations.

event-sequencer2.pd

(Although it might be better still to write the commas in the text).

@weightless Great! Here it is with a modified version of the vanilla [list-drip] that outputs two entries at once: event-sequencer.pd

@ingox You can also have a look at this solution (not sure if it's vanilla or not):
https://www.chnry.net/ch/spip.php?article94

Cheers

Thanks so much to everyone for the big help. much appreciated