I recently bought a synthesizer that has a given level of available
polyphony; it can play a certain number of  simultaneous notes at one time.
As I noted in a previous email, I have been testing the limits
of my machine's ability to render csound orchestras in realtime
at the beck and call of my MIDI keyboard.

I know that the synthesizer that I am using keeps track of
the number of 'notes' that are used, and expires the oldest
ones in favor of the ones that are more recently activated.

My question is whether others have attacked the same problem
using cound.  Has anybody come up with a way to expire active
instruments based on the present level of polyphony?

As always, thanks very much.

Tobiah

http://www.csounds.com/manual/html/maxalloc.html

?



-David

On May 2, 2006, at 5:24 PM, Tobiah wrote:

> Has anybody come up with a way to expire active
> instruments based on the present level of polyphony?

David Akbari wrote:
> 
> http://www.csounds.com/manual/html/maxalloc.html
> 

This is interesting, but I don't think it's quite
what I need.  If I read it correctly, maxalloc
simply denies new invocations of an instrument
when the allocation is reached.  What I wanted
was for the oldest notes in the queue to be dropped
off.  The idea is that I could hold down the sustain
pedal and continue to play a wash of notes, probably
not noticing the old notes die away.  With a piano
sort of voice, the chances are that by the time
a note is up for the kill, it's amplitude would
be very small anyway.

David Akbari wrote:
> 
> http://www.csounds.com/manual/html/maxalloc.html
> 

This is interesting, but I don't think it's quite
what I need.  If I read it correctly, maxalloc
simply denies new invocations of an instrument
when the allocation is reached.  What I wanted
was for the oldest notes in the queue to be dropped
off.  The idea is that I could hold down the sustain
pedal and continue to play a wash of notes, probably
not noticing the old notes die away.  With a piano
sort of voice, the chances are that by the time
a note is up for the kill, it's amplitude would
be very small anyway.