Broadcasters best practices

[Lindon]

@d-healey said in Broadcasters best practices:

@Christoph-Hart Ah ok that makes sense, thanks

does this mean you are investigating Broadcasters with a view to doing a video on it? (fingers crossed here...)

[d.healey]

@Lindon I've been using them since they were a thing. I'll make a broadcaster video for this weekend

[Christoph Hart]

@d-healey If you find any UX hurdles during the making of the video, let me know then I'll clean it up.

[d.healey]

Can broadcasters be defined as global? I might have finally found a use case for a global variable.

In my project I have a few MIDI processors that do things when the user changes articulation. My current method of handling this is each of the scripts has a knob to keep track of the current articulation. And when the articulation is changed all these knobs are updated and their callbacks triggered.

I'm thinking though it might be nice to just have a global articulation watcher instead of these knobs. That way the scripts will be more independent - which is the opposite of my usual argument against globals :)

[d.healey]

@d-healey said in Broadcasters best practices:

Can broadcasters be defined as global?

Well I thought this was working, but then a user noticed a bug. If in the DAW the track with the plugin is duplicated the broadcaster behaviour seems to break. Are globals shared between plugin instances somehow?

[aaronventure]

@d-healey ooh boy. Does it affect other globals as well?

[d.healey]

@aaronventure This is the only global I'm using so haven't tested it with others

[Christoph Hart]

@aaronventure no globals are used per instance. The only relevant thing that I know that is shared is the timer thread so if you have multiple instances with busy timers you might experience UI freezes.

[d.healey]

@Christoph-Hart No timer here just a global broadcaster. When I remove that code and implement the same functionality without the global the problem goes away. I'll see if I can make an isolated example.

[Christoph Hart]

@d-healey yup an isolated example would be useful, I wouldn't know why it should behave like that but maybe I missed something, it's definitely not supposed to do so.

[d.healey]

I managed to isolate it.

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So the buttons in the Interface script send a message to the broadcaster with the index of the button that was pressed. In the second script processor, there is a listener on the broadcaster. The listener gets the value that was passed, updates the knob value in the script processor and calls the .changed function on the knob. In the knob's callback it sets the value of the knob on the Interface script to this value.

Now interestingly - if I don't use the .changed callback in the second script and instead put all the functionality in the listener then it works.

I've been testing this as an expansion in Rhapsody so I didn't have to keep recompiling, I haven't actually tested it as a plugin...

To recreate the issue, add the plugin to a track, click the buttons and you'll see the knob on the UI match the index of the button that was clicked. Then duplicate the track, open the plugin UI on the new instance, click the button and the knob value doesn't update.

[d.healey]

I did a test to see if it was just the changed call by itself - I removed the broadcaster entirely and just called .changed from both scripts. The problem was not present in this scenario so it seems the issue is with calling .changed from the broadcaster across scripts.

[d.healey]

Here's another test. This one I keep the broadcaster but remove the secondary MIDI processor, and everything works. So it definitely seems to be something related to calling it in another processor.

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[Christoph Hart]

@d-healey yes, don‘t. The global variable system breaks apart as soon as you are calling functions from other script processors as it was designed for data sharing across modules. Treat the option that you can slap a broadcaster to a global variable and react to events from another module as an easter egg functionality but I absolutely cannot guarantee that it will work 100%.

[d.healey]

@Christoph-Hart Duly noted, I'll continue with my other method then