The play~ object can be controlled by any MSP signal in its inlet. The value of the signal controls the location in the buffer~, in milliseconds. Normal playback can be achieved in this way by using a linear signal, such as from a line~ object, that traverses a given time span in the expected amount of time.
You can use the play~ object to play the contents of a buffer~, simply by sending it a start message. By default it starts from the beginning of the buffer~. You can specify a different starting time, in milliseconds, as an argument to the start message, or you can specify both a starting time and a stopping time (in ms) as two arguments to the start message. In the patch, you can see two examples of the use of ‘starttime’ and ‘stoptime’ arguments.
One of the earliest methods of digital sound synthesis was a digital version of the electronic oscillator, which was the most common sound generator in analog synthesizers. The method used was simply to read repeatedly, at the established sample rate, through a stored array of samples that represent one cycle of the desired sound wave. By changing the step size with which one increments through the stored wavetable, one can alter the number of cycles one completes per second, which will determine the perceived fundamental frequency of the resulting tone.
The buffer~ object holds audio data in RAM as an array of 32-bit floating point numbers (floats). The fact that the sound is loaded into RAM, rather than read continuously off the hard drive as the sfplay~ object does, means that it can be accessed quickly and in various ways, for diverse audio effects (including normal playback).
This is effectively pretty much identical to Trigger sound cues from the computer keyboard, but a) it allows the user to trigger sound cues either
This shows how to prepare multiple sound cues for playback, and how to detect specific keystrokes in order to trigger the sound cues. It also shows how to initialize a program by triggering certain messages as soon as the patch is opened. The sound signal is sent through a multiplier to adjust the gain (volume).
For this patch to work correctly, you must have the six guitar string samples in the same directory as you save this Max patch.
This patch demonstrates how to adjust the delay time of a comb filter to make the filter correspond to a desired fundamental pitch.
Max provides an object called gen~ that opens up a new patching window in which you can program audio at the sample level. You build an audio network inside the gen~ window with objects that are quite similar to MSP objects, but within the gen~ window there is only audio, no non-audio events.
This example consists of a .zip archive of files. Together they demonstrate the idea of organizing one’s sound files in a specific folder, and then using the full path to that folder to ensure finding the sound files when you want to play them.