i'm putting together a massive visual recital and loadbanging a large number of movie clips in order to be able to call them to play quickly. Problem is that the rendering starts to slow down a LOT. Is there any way to clear the memory buffers as old gemheads are turned off and new ones are turned on? Any other speed loading/emptying tips for large multi-clip productions in realtime?

Just got a new HP laptop, hoping that the latest graphics card would help speed up GEM rendering. While picture color quality has improved, speed hasn't. More importantly, one of my favorite effects - the ripple - doesn't seem to work properly anymore. It just jiggles the whole picture around without deforming it like it used to on my old XP machine.
Argh. I feel like i have an expensive Vista paperweight now. Any suggestions on getting my ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics card to talk nicely to GEM, or tweaking the ripple object to actually ripple?

Ah! Fixed my own problem - not an issue with the graphics card at all! Apparently, to get the watery ripple effect, you have to 'clamp to edge' and/or set the rectangle -texturing via the [pix_texture] object (see the help on this). Playing with these settings gets more of the ripple distortion effect i was looking for.
Whew! Now that vista paperweight has redeemed its value (for now)!

Ok - here's what i've been able to come up with so far, thanks to everyone's help! I used bonk~ and moses to help distinguish loud and soft audio inputs, and then sent the resulting signals to two variations of the sendkeytoapp.vbs scripts. Overall it works well, but i'm noticing a significant delay from PD to the external app.

I'm still trying to get my head around using sendOSC and somehow calling the python version of SendKey directly from within PD - i have the sendOSC apparently successfully opening a socket, but i don't know how to follow through and send keypress text to another application. Any additional help to explore this option would be greatly appreciated! I'm learning so much from everyone here - thanks a million!!

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/loudsoftsendkey.zip

This new vbs app is very, very cool - thanks so much, jon2211! Is there any way to modify this so that the script can accept variable text/strings printed from within PD, instead of a defined text within the vbs script? i'd like to be able to create multiple parameters within PD sending different text strings for different conditions - perhaps sending "A" for a 440 pitch through fiddle~ and then a "C" keystroke if the pitch changes to 523.25 (C above middle A). Sorry for all the hand-holding, this Newbie REALLY appreciates all the help he's getting

argh! so close, and yet so far! i'm using a presentation program called Liquid Media that has the visual programming simplicity of Powerpoint. i was hoping to be able to use PD to trigger assignable keystrokes to activate visual events within Liquid Media...can anyone come up with a simple way to have PD emulate a keyboard? Even if it means rigging up a second computer to "talk" to the other via an ethernet cable? I guess i'm showing my reluctance to dive into GEM, given how complex it looks...

Just to clarify - i'm hoping i can have PD emulate a keyboard with the text outputs. Does that make sense? Is that even possible?

Ok, i can see how substituting the osc~ with adc~ can get PD to recognize A440 when i play it on my piano. Here are a few more questions:
1. How can i get PD to actually print (send the typed characters) to an external application, like Powerpoint?
2. The patch seems to continually send the text string. Is there a way to limit the keystroke repetitions? Perhaps some sort of timing variable requiring a certain amount of time to elapse before "re-firing" the text string?

Thanks so much for your help! This is exciting! PD is so cool!

This looks terrific! Can't wait to try it out - can you make another example using volume as a variable instead of pitch? Thank you soooo much!!

Well, i'd like to experiment with live audio options - i'm a collaborative pianist and want to see what kind of effects we can control with various acoustic instrument and vocal ensembles

Can this patch be modified as follows? i'm looking to have a microphone input that not only recognizes pitch but that can also distinguish amplitude. Here's the tricky part: i'd like to be able to assign keyboard/text outputs depending on the output. For instance, if a piano plays a 440A, i'd like the patch to recognize that and then output the letter "A"; if the sound hits a certain dB range, i'd like to assign another key stroke (say "F") that could be outputted to another program like PowerPoint to trigger visual cues.

I've read on the PDList that some folks suggest using fiddle~ and moses~ - being a total PD newbie, i'm hoping some kind soul will write up a working patch that i can learn from and possibly modify. Thanks!