Help is unclear: You can write e.g. bpm as "tempo x min" or "tempo x minutes" or "tempo x permin" or ... here's the one that is not clearly documented, is it "tempo x perminute" or "tempo x perminutes"?

Reading the help literally it would be "perminutes" but nobody talks like that.

[metro] does not print errors for wrong unit symbols so I can't guess it that way. (Not to mention that the point of good documentation is to eliminate this sort of guesswork.)

Does anyone know?

hjh

@ddw_music I think you can ignore the "s" and should not use it...... that it is just a carry over from the more colloquial usage in the list......

• millisecond (msec for short);
• seconds (sec);
• minutes (min);
• samples (samp) - depends on the sample rate the patch is running

The "s" is not used in any of the examples I think.
The text that follows in the help-file seems precise......
"These symbols can also be preceeded by "per" (as in "permin", "permsec", etc.) In this case, 60 permin means 1/60 min (hence, the same as 'BPM')."

David.

@whale-av The context is to create an abstraction to convert time values from a unit specified in a tempo message to ms. The abstraction needs to accept every possible variant -- that is, the question is not how to write a tempo message as a personal style feature -- the question is how to interpret correctly every possible valid symbol.

It turns out... when documentation fails, one can always search the source code.

        if (!strcmp(s2, "millisecond") || !strcmp(s2, "msec"))  /* msec */
            *samps = 0, *unit = 1./amount;
        else if (!strncmp(s2, "sec", 3))        /* seconds */
            *samps = 0, *unit = 1000./amount;
        else if (!strncmp(s2, "min", 3))        /* minutes */
            *samps = 0, *unit = 60000./amount;
        else if (!strncmp(s2, "sam", 3))        /* samples */
            *samps = 1, *unit = 1./amount;

I.e.,

• For milliseconds, write exactly "millisecond" or "msec" (no plural), with or without "per."
• The other time units match the first three characters only and the rest are ignored. So you could write "perminimum" and it would be treated like "permin."

So... [list fromsymbol] it will have to be.

EDIT: Like this:

I cheated and allow e.g. "millisec" where MSP's code would reject it, but, close enough.

hjh