garageCube

[jasonbeyers]

The "restart" action (on a material) does not seem to behave properly when bpm sync is enabled, in my OSX 10.14.3 environment, with MM 3.6.7 as well as 3.6.8. I see an issue with specific ranges of speed for a time_base generator: 0.2 to 1.0.

Steps:
1. Set the Madmapper BPM source to Manual, set at 120pm. Or you can use any clock source, including Ableton Live or audio input
2. Set the built-in Strobe material speed to 0.75 and enable BPM sync, leaving everything else at their default values.
3. Verify that there is one flash for every beat

Now after step #3, hit the "Restart" button on the material repeatedly -- faster than the beats. I observe no change in the output of any kind here; the strobe material does not seem to be responding to "restart" when bpm sync is on. If you slow down the speed to 0.4 and try this again, you'll notice that the output *does* change, but it never resets completely.

Now disable bpm sync and again hit "restart" repeatedly. If you go really fast, you should notice that the output basically stays white. The material is correctly restarting here, and this works regardless of the material's animation speed.

Now if you set the speed to 0.2 and re-enable bpm sync, things seem to work perfectly! So this is definitely inconsistent.

I don't remember hitting this issue with older versions of MM.. and I notice this in the 3.7 beta and 3.6.5 as well. The last couple of my projects didn't rely on "restart" working, but my new project unfortunately requires this in basically all my cues, so I'm stuck right now. I can reproduce this with any material and with any clock source.

I can reproduce this with other materials too, including Line Animation and Line Patterns. I can easily reproduce this with my own materials too, where I assign a button to the "reset" action for a time_base or animator generator. I can artificially increase the animation speed by multiplying the time_base output by something greater than 1.0 and achieve proper restarting by using a speed of 0.2 or less, but this is an unreliable workaround.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!!
-Jason

[mad-matt]

Hi Jason,
That’s actually the expected behaviour. When "BPM Sync" is activated ("bpm_sync" parameter of the "time_base" generated in ISF header), the value generated will be an integer on each beat (at least if speed is more than zero). At speed = 1, the value will be 0,1,2,3 on each beat. If you press restart at the middle time between two beats, the value will restart at 0.5 and not at 0.
If you don’t want this behaviour don’t activate the BPM Sync option. The speed of materials is anyway linked to the BPM. So adjusting the BPM would also affect the speed.
However, in MadMappert 3.7.0 there will be a new setting: "bpm_phase_sync" to disable phase sync, so restarting will set the value at 0, and the offset between the time base and the bpm position will be kept. So if you press "restart" at the middle time between two beats, the value will restart at 0, and the value will increase by 1 on each beat.
Cheers!