[chuck-dev] ChucK plugin for PD

Ge Wang gewang at CS.Princeton.EDU
Mon Oct 16 23:43:58 EDT 2006


Hi Mike and all!

> After using both ChucK and PD, I have noticed that PD is far more
> efficient at generating audio. I have created two simple patches in
> both PD and ChucK that were just sine wave generator. The patch in
> Chuck could only handle 20 voices before it started to generate an
> audible sputter, while the same patch in PD was able to handle almost
> 200 voices before there was any audible degradation of the sound. I am
> working on a G5 Mac Laptop (not sure of the clock speed)

ChucK is pretty abysmally slow, but it should handle quite a bit more 
than 20 sine waves on a powerbook?  On my 1ghz G4 12" powerbook, I get 
about 60 sine waves before things go south, and over 100 on a 1.5ghz 
12" powerbook.  What is the code you are using to test this?  What 
version of chuck?  Also, the SinOsc in ChucK is also not the best thing 
to benchmark, since it generates the sine wave inefficiently.  Though 
by that logic, not many things in ChucK are good to benchmark, huh huh.

One of the these days, after we get stuff more "right", we'll think 
about optimization.

One thing I'd love to see in chuck~ is the option to route code from 
various chuck~ instances to the same chuck virtual machine.  I guess 
this is a feature request to both Brad and Martin?  With this 
capability, it'd be possible to leverage chuck's concurrent programming 
model to synchronize different pieces of code.  Alternately, each 
chuck~ could be its own virtual machine (this is currently the case in 
chuck~ for Max, I think), and the programmer would be able to send 
different code in real-time to chuck~ via an inlet.  Thoughts?

Thanks again to Brad for starting the ~ revolution and to Martin for 
forging ahead!

Best,
Ge!



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