Now that I've got the ttk styles down the frontend would take about 5 minutes to make. Actually making it do something would take a lot longer, unless there's
a trick to it that one of the audio gurus knows about.

I may be wrong but that feature only seems important in making insane patches sane. If you make an audio-producing patch in a maintainable way I imagine you'd have everything ending up in a single [dac~] somewhere, especially a patch that's
massive-channel. In that case you could make an abstraction [ltop~] with
the same number of inlets as the [dac~],edit the [dac~] object box and make it an [ltop~], then route the logical [inlets~] inside your abstraction to the physical
channels of a [dac~] inside it.  It doesn't work if there are [dac~]s
sprinkled throughout a complex patch, but then that kind of patch probably doesn't
work anyway. :)

But if the idea is to avoid editing the patch itself and instead edit the Pd instance,
maybe someone can write a gui-plugin to automate what I wrote above.
You'd right-click on a [dac~] and choose "map i/o" and it opens up a patch window with [inlet~]s corresponding to the number of of logical inputs, with a [dac~] sitting in the middle of the patch. That's a much better user-interface than a
big table.  Do the same with [outlet~]s and [adc~] and you're done.

I can't say anything about the technical points behind it. But I'll just give an example of a patch I've programmed for someone to illustrate this point:
- the piece has either 2 or 6 inputs and outputs (to be chosen separately)
- the channels chosen for the number of inputs can be varied depending on the hardware: I've programmed a [adc~ 1 2 3 4 5 6], but when I performed myself the piece I used adc~ 11-16 or adc~ 8-14 (the spdif channels are switched in the linux driver). - another person performing the piece with another hardware will use other input/output channels - the purpose of the patch (and of any patch that is sent with a score) is that it should be performed without the performer having to go inside it - many people don't know how to use a specific software, and the software should allow them to run the patch without any special effort

These problems would be solved in the most easy way, if adc~/dac~ would allow for a "set" method. A paralel solution would be to change the routings of the audio channels in the audio settings - and if it's there, then I could e.g. build a GUI for it, and save a configuration file for a given performance. That means, the user would be able to set up everything with a few clicks.

Surely these aren't the most relevant feature that need to be implemented, but they would give some help.



Btw, related to this topic and to your startnext idea: how about a messaging system that allows to edit an object? E.g. replace a [expr $f1+1] with [expr $f1-1]. This would provide a (not optimal) solution to the problems above, and would extend the possibilities of dynamic patching a lot.

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