Hello!

I've been working with pd for some time now, mostly with video and visual tracking, but not that much with sound.
So basically I have this classic guitar and I wanna try to add some PD effects to change the output sound, but here's the thing, there's a big delay (like half a second I guess...is there a way to measure it?) between the time I hit the note and the time PD takes to give me the output, even with no effects at all...
Here's what I have:

It's a simple "Line In --> Line Out", shouldn't this be very close to a real time output?
I tried to change the values on the audio settings delay but it wont make any difference, also tried in both standard and ASIO.
I guess it's some kind of conflict that's lagging PD once I have no microphone lag on regular windows environment - outside PD.
Also I get a fuzz like and some kind odd echo in PD output, but I guess that could be related to the delay...

My cpu:
Windows XP SP2
Pentuim 4 CPU 3.00GHz 1GB RAM
Sound Card is Realtek AC'97
Everything works fine except for what I explained above.

Don't know if anyone can help me with this, but thanks in advance.

Hello!

I just came from a 4 day workshop about PD. I liked it so much that I already bought arduino, a couple of sensors and a webcam.
Anyway I was working on college computers and everything was ready to use, but now I installed it on my pc and I can't read wave files from it.

The error is:
"signal outlet connect to nonsignal inlet", and it happens every time I try to play a .wav file, when I select "compute audio" on console, when I select "Audio on", and every time I touch on "audio settings" or "ASIO".
I run the "test audio and MIDI" and I can hear both test signals. I've tried using some example patches in the 3.audio.examples folder and I could hear pc sounds.
Happens either I use GEM or not.

I made a file that has a .wav and I'm using the webcam as motion sensor to change the sound pitch. As I try to play the .wav, the console shows that error.
The .wav file is in the same folder as the PD file ofc.

I searched the forum and google for solutions:
@Thor said:

Go to Preferences > Audio Settings
then choose your built-in-audio or whatever device you use
I have noticed that when I use my isight with GEM, PD sometimes defaults to use it as input AND output (!)
try that and I bet you will be ok

=didnt work

@nickj said:

If you have a camera plugged in (ichat) , go into preferences -> audio settings then untick the input (isight) device 1.

=didnt work - dont have ichat cam but still I checked if it had any sound input and it doesnt.

@http://en.flossmanuals.net/PureData/TroubleShooting said:

I get the message "error: signal outlet connect to nonsignal inlet (ignored)" when I open a patch.

This error tends to go with the previous error "I get the message '... couldn't create' when I open a patch...". Often this error means that an object has failed to create, usually because it uses an External Object which is not available in the current installation or configuration of PD. PD will preserve the location and connections of an object which fails to create, but it will not function. You can use the "Find last error" function under the "Find" menu to track down which objects caused errors. PD will treat uncreated objects as Dataflow Objects even if they were originally Audio Objects, so this error will follow the previous one. Please see the relevant sections in the "Configuring PD" chapter for information about setting the "Path" and "Startup" options. If the External is not available in PD Extended, you may need to install it yourself.

now I ran out of ideas and just decided to ask...

I have:

• Pd-0.40.3-extended
• Win XP SP2
• Vimicro USB pc cam (VC0305)
• Realtek AC'97 Audio

If anyone can help, thx in advance.

@ZombieControl said:

Not familiar with the objects/abstractions you are using for input and output.

Do you still have the issue if you go from [adc~] to [dac~] ?

Yeah I do... same delay and same fuzzy effect.

@pineapple said:

Delay is produced for soundcard not for Puredata.

I assumed that the delay had something to do with my soundcard's communication strictly with PD, once I have no delay with other applications.

@pineapple said:

For my experience, I think your problem is using Realtek soundcard. You need a soundcard with near to zero latency like RME (www.rme-audio.com), MOTU, presonus etc.
Delay is produced for soundcard not for Puredata. You need ASIO drivers.

Ok... a new soundcard is not an option for me at the moment....
I could try and search for some ASIO drivers that could eventually work with my sound card... I've red some stuff about doing it but I'm not sure if that's safe at all, nor if that will make it any better...

Thanks for the fast replies.

Awesome, it works fine now!

Thx allot for ur time hardoff, and
a merry x-mas for everyone.

@hardoff said:

open the [ehu/sound~] abstraction and have a look at the [xgroove~] , [xrecord~] objects. are they surrounded by red dashes? if so, that means they are not creating. they didn't create here for me...and i think they are not part of the normal pd-extended distribution.

in that case, load the xsample library, which you can get to from here:

http://puredata.info/Members/thomas/

Yes I see the red dots there too.
I downloaded the xsample files you told me to - everything inside the PD folder on that link. It didn't have any xgroove~, xrecord~ nor sound~ files there and it didn't fix my problem - most likely I'm doing something wrong, so let me explain what I did:

• renamed all files ended in *.pd_darwin to .pd (tried using them both ways, as they were when I downloaded, and after renaming);
• put all the above in pd/extras folder and an extra copy on pd/extra/osx;
• put all dlls on pd/extra (replaced old ones) and extra copy in pd/extra/win;
• created a folder named xsample on pd/extras and placed another copy of everything there too;
• added all these to "path..." on PD console.

This is probably an easy problem to fix, but I feel such a noob right now...

The guy who led the workshop gave us some PD files so we could learn to use video and sound - the folder is called ehu_abstaractions, I'm sure u guys know what it is.
I had to install it myself on my pc, and I just pasted the "documentation" and the "ehu" folders on programs/pd/extra, so I could use and open those objects here on my pc...otherwise it wouldn't work. I also added "ehu" to the global objectclass path on pd - dunno if I did right or wrong here, but I tried allot of stuff...

I'll zip the pd file I made and the ehu patch and attach it here.

Thx for the help.

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/Project+ehu.zip