Hiya,

I just started using pd and have already made a couple patches that I'm pretty happy with. But now I am trying to make one of my synths polyphonic, and it seems that the nqpoly4 object is mysteriously missing from my library. Whenever I try and create it, the object stays outlined in red, as if it hasn't been recognized. But isn't nqpoly4 supposed to be in the pd-extended library?

Does anyone have any idea what is going on here, or how to fix it? (Failing that, are there any other objects for polyphony which I could try using instead?)

Thanks for your help!

Pd-extended is bundled with a collection of libraries (it's not a single library) and not all of them are loaded by default. [nqpoly4] is not. Its in a library called...nqpoly4. I believe it's the only one in there. Anyway, you can add it to your path, or just type [nqpoly4/nqpoly4].

You don't need it for polyphony, though. It's just meant to make patch polyphony less cumbersome (and I believe to emulate Max's [poly~]). Take a look at [poly] and Help Browser/3.audio.examples/D11.sampler.poly.pd to see how to do it without it.

Thanks! That helps tons.

One reason why I wanted to use [nqpoly4] was because I saw that it is supposed to imitate poly~ in max, and I seem to recall that one neat thing poly~ does is is to only run as many copies of your abstraction as are needed at any one moment, to save on CPU usage. Do you know if [nqpoly4] does that too? Or maybe there are other, more manual ways to save the CPU. Obviously it's not that big a deal on a synth with only 8 voices or so, but I imagine it would be more significant in a granular synth with tons of voices.

Anyway, thanks again!

@Stutter said:

One reason why I wanted to use [nqpoly4] was because I saw that it is supposed to imitate poly~ in max, and I seem to recall that one neat thing poly~ does is is to only run as many copies of your abstraction as are needed at any one moment, to save on CPU usage. Do you know if [nqpoly4] does that too?

I just took a look inside it, and it doesn't appear to do it on it's own. The normal way to save on cpu cycles when an abstraction isn't being used is to put a [switch~] in it. Send it a [0( to turn audio processing off within the abstraction and [1( to turn it on when you need it. So with [nqpoly4], you'd want to make sure that the voice turns itself when it receives a note-on message or whatever, and once it's done playing, turn itself off. (And of course, you would really want to do the same thing with your voice abstraction if you were doing it with [poly]->[route] combo, too.)

It's the same, really, with Max's [poly~]. It only switches dsp on and off for each voice if you program it to. And as I recall, in Max it's kind of a pain in the ass compared to just using [switch~].

The real advantage to using [nqpoly4] is in the patching, particularly when doing something that might need hundreds or thousands of instances, like granular synthesis. You don't have to patch all those in yourself since [nqpoly4] does it internally.