hi all ~

one of the projects i'm currently working on is recreating a particular a-d function generator in pd. i'm in the early stages of development with this, and relatively new to pd, so this might be a simple question to answer. right now i have my attack and decay sliders set up to output floats to a pack, then onto a message containing $ variables which is then passed to vline. ideally this should allow for a user to modulate the attack and decay times in realtime - using some means of input (bang, note, etc.) to trigger or re-trigger the envelope. an issue i am running into is that while the decay slider can be modulated without the envelope being triggered, the attack slider triggers the envelope any time an adjustment is made. my suspicion is that this has to do with pack, as it outputs when it receives a float to its first inlet. so i suppose this is my question: is there a way to prevent pack from sending when this adjustment is made? is there another object i should be using instead to aggregate the floats? any thoughts or advice would be much appreciated!

here's a screenshot of the subpatch for reference

@cmovvv Hi there,

Yes, the left inlet of most objects in Pd is the "hot" inlet, which means the object will output immediately when anything is sent to it. "Cold" inlets are for setting values without causing the object to output, which is why you can send floats to the middle/right inlets of [pack] without triggering your envelope.

There are several ways to prevent immediate output, here are a few that come to mind:

It's also worth noting that you have a problem with one of your number boxes (the one displaying "69.92" in your screenshot) in that you haven't defined the execution order being sent to [pack f f f}, Always use a trigger object to ensure that you're sending output in the correct order (as I did with my rightmost example), otherwise you will inevitably run into problems. I see that you have used several triggers elsewhere, but most of them look unnecessary — the top right one is sending the float first & then a bang second, but because the float has already been sent to the hot inlet of [* }, the bang is redundant. (if you check with [print] you'll find that you're actually sending the result of the multiplication twice, but in this case no harm done)

@beep.beep hi! thanks for your insights and feedback. i was able to get it working with spigot as you detailed. and ah yeah, you're right - def could do with reviewing my triggers - was working later than i should have when i put that part together hah

best,
kit