Ah, excellent, that does it! Thank you again!

Hmm, yeah, that's what I thought - I've attached the patch I just edited, can you tell me if this is acting right to you?list3.pd

One last thing - if I wanted to flip it so that it output the highest number, rather than lowest, what would need to be changed? I've had a quick play and can't quite get that functionality to work.

@gsagostinho ah, for some reason when I redownloaded it, the patch worked fine! Thanks so much for that, you solved some serious headscratching I was having!

@gsagostinho Ah, okay, I must have misunderstood your patch then - I've replaced inf with 1000, and it seems that only the first list I send gets through the spigot, and then anything else isn't passed, regardless of what number it ends in. What have I missed here?

Hi @gsagostinho and @rjp9

Thanks for taking the time to reply! I really appreciate it.

I don't think I explained my requirements properly, as I don't think these aren't quite what I was after. The exact situation is that each list is a set of midi info basically, ending in the negative number. Each of these lists is being sent from another software over OSC at various times. I want to only play the midi info contained in the list ending with the lowest number at any one point, which will probably involve checking incoming lists against what is already playing back, and replacing the currently playing list with the new one, if that new list has a lower negative number (by that I mean if a list ending in -32 was playing, then that would be replaced if a list with -23 was received). Is that a little clearer? It's a weird situation and an odd problem, I know!

Hi all,

So, I have lists formatted as a series of varying-length strings each ending in a negative number, such as:
[this that and -32(
and
[but 35that -23(
etc
I have these coming into my patch at various times, and what I need is a way to check each list as it arrives, and to only pass it if it ends in a negative number smaller than that in any of the previous lists. There may at times be two or three such lists arriving at once, so any solution needs to dynamically compare multiple lists and output the list which ends in the smallest number. Any thoughts on how this could be achieved?

I solved it actually - turns out it was due to user permissions for the script in rc.local which meant the script didn't have access to the sound hardware. For future ref if you have this problem, you need to add the main user (in this case pi) to the rc.local script along with whatever you want it to execute.