Thanks, I'll take a look at that.

When I search for how to do voice stealing in Pure Data, I find poly. But poly just seems to be for MIDI notes. I'm calculating frequencies on the fly; MIDI notes won't work for me. How do you do voice stealing in Pure Data when you aren't using MIDI notes? Thanks for any help or suggestions!

@lacuna Adding [switch~] to the abstraction almost completely eliminated the noise. Thanks! It didn't occur to me that [osc~] and [dsp~] objects that weren't producing sound would use so much system resources.

Next I'll look at wavetables. Can all the instances of an abstraction share the same wavetable, or does each instance need to have its own copy of the wavetable?

@whale-av You can ignore my last question. I don't think a single [dac~] object would solve the problem. I'm looking at a patch I made last summer that has 2,940 [osc~] objects and 105 [dac~] objects and no noise problems. The logic is a bit different, but I don't yet see how the differences in the new patch could cause the noise. Time to do some more experiments...

@whale-av Is there a way to route all of the [osc~] objects in all of the abstractions to a single [dac~] object?

I reduced the number of [osc~] objects to 27, and still have noise. The noise doesn't sound as bad as it did before, but the strange thing is that the noise happens just as often with 27 [osc~] objects as it did with 4374 [osc~] objects. That makes me wonder if there is something more going on here than just the number of [osc~] objects.

I've started looking at the poly thread, but it will take me a while to figure out whether there's something there that can solve my problem. Thanks.

I changed [vline~] to [line] as you suggested, but that introduced a new noise. [line~] worked better.

I'll try making an abstraction for the 81 groups. That will reduce the number of [osc~] objects to 1458. Do you think that will be enough to eliminate the noise?

I typically only play one chord at time, but I was hoping to be able to play two or three. I don't know how to implement voice stealing, but I'm starting to research it. Do you know of any examples of voice stealing I could look at?

Thanks for your help.

One correction to what I originally posted... there aren't 80 bangs, there are 81 groups of 3 bangs, so 243 bangs altogether that can each invoke the abstraction 3 times.

I don't know whether it's related, but I couldn't try one of the PD audio options. I'm using "old MMIO system". If I try to change to "standard (portaudio)", I get the message, "error opening audio: Invalid sample rate", no matter what the sample rate is set to.