hello,

i am making progress on my drum machine. i now have a working version with no bugs. there are many next steps, but i'm concentrating on the issue of saving patterns because it is the most mystifying to me. right now, i can load beats using qlist.

the sounds are controlled by a grid of toggles, each row representing a drum sound and each column representing a beat (there are sixteen beats). when a toggle is on (1), the drum sound plays. when it's off (0), nothing.

from my point of view (one of ignorance when it comes to the qlist and textfile objects), the most obvious method of saving patterns would be to save each change as it is made. since that would only alter a few characters in a textfile, i don't see it as using too much memory.

note: as i wrote that last paragraph, the "obvious method" changed from something very stupid to what you see. i think i can figure out what i can described without help, but i would still appreciate any ideas you have.

leo

in the past couple days i have built a very extensive saving system that didn't work, and now i'm back to the drawing board. it's okay, because i looked at the documentation for qlist and textfile in max/msp. you really do get what you pay for. i'm now working on using qlist to assign each drum sound a dedicated line in the file, and then have qlist navigate to the correct line and make changes. this seems necessary to prevent the creation of a new line each time a change is made, which is what happened with my first idea.

my questions are:
is there a way to tell qlist (or textfile) which line to go to? i know that you can in max but those commands don't work in pd. maybe a port of max's qlist and textfile objects is in order.

is there a way to automate repetition of messages? i could navigate to the correct line by sending "next 1" to qlist x times where x=the number of the line i'm trying to navigate to.

are there any other objects (including third-party) that can manage textfiles similarly?

thanks, leo

about the [textfile] or [qlist] i had never figure how do this kind of job.

For this kind of job, in the past, i had use the [pool] object : http://grrrr.org/ext/

Here a very interesting article about this subject : http://footils.org/cms/show/1

If [pool] is too complicated, cyclone [coll] will do the saving job as well.

patco

pool looks really awesome but i think that coll might be better suited to what i need. thanks!

or, if you decide to go back to your original idea, [msgfille] in zexy is liek a bigger, more powerful version of [textfile]