Not a lot done today – rather poorly, alas, so I’ve had a quiet day developing a business plan instead of writing music of various persuasions, but I’ve dragged myself up to the studio this evening to poke about at this a bit and it’s not been entirely wasted.

There were issues with the previous start I’d made on the compilation patch, but some useful stuff in there, so I went back to paper and wrote out the sequence of what I needed to receive, calculate and do/send where, and how that might differ for the first section and the last from what would be repeated for the central sections.

So I’ve remade what I did before, in a rather more orderly fashion (and nice and neat – worked out how to set a global font for a patch so it looks all pretty now!). I’ve made a tiny subpatch to calculate the position of a trigger point then convert it to ticks, and this is being used twice, to calculate the next trigger point and the previous one so that I can calculate the minimum duration of the playback section. I then ran into a bit of a snag because all the files are different durations, so just having a minimum millisecond duration isn’t really of much help here at the moment. I think I’m going to have to pass the ms min duration back and maybe make adjustments in a different subpatch after the next section to be played has been chosen, because I’ll need to take the full duration of the soundfile, then if it’s not the first or last file to be played, I’ll need to calculate a starting point and end point at random while ensuring that the duration is at least the minimum I’ve just worked out here to cover the space until the next trigger point. ack. All too much for my tiny germ-filled brain right now, I fear. Anyway, it’s something at least.

I am pleased to find that I’m remembering more bits and able to use stuff in Max with a modicum of confidence now. It took a moment to remember what the command was to squish stuff together into a list, but only a moment, and once I had ‘pack’, I knew it was right and just typed it in then checked in the help file. Likewise I’m using key commands now for integer and float boxes, comments, messages and new objects, and even starting to use typed objects to create stuff that doesn’t end up like words, like panels, buttons and LEDs – so much quicker than having to find them in the menus!

Not sure how much I’ll get done tomorrow – we’ve got a meeting with a new accountant in Essex, then I have to go to Ealing to be crushed once more by my osteopath, but hopefully there’ll be something to report. And there’s always more reading. Today I finished the Thames & Hudson Video Art book, so that’s found its home at last on the bookshelf. Am about 2/3 of the way through the other one – lost a little momentum there when it got mired in ‘computer art’ and wireframes and stuff that doesn’t hugely interest me, but it seems to be making its way back towards multimedia at least.