Hi there, it is my first official post about TD programming (probably totally not interesting, except for me, as it is a milestones. I’m coming and still into Max since about 20 years and still teaching it.)
Pardon my very newbie first questions, I’m doing my best for tutorializing, reading, learning.
I know we can connect nodes by wires (drag’n’dropping from input, output etc)
But, I know we can also refer (connect?) things by using drag’n’drop nodes to other nodes’ parameter field.
Is there a difference ? I mean, in some case, can we do both but prefferably one to against the other ? Or is it just the nodes type & action we want to do that gives us the way to follow ?
Thats a good question!
This probably is up to discussion and some way this is ahndled is also due to backward compatibility and the residue of older paradigms, for example before extensions and customparameter were a thing.
The way I see it is the following:
Things we wire are our data-stream. Left goes in, right goes out.
All the parameters are there to modify the datastream/generate data. The LFO-Chop or MathCHOP are good examples. The LFO-Chop generates a new datastream and the mathCHOP takes it in and modifies it depending on the parameters you have set. The DataStream does not change the parameter in any way.
A little bit more difficult is the behavior with some other components like widgets, where the element changes the parameterSet because parameters also evolved to be some kind of statemashine and data-storage which I personaly see as bad style, but that is up for debate.
(probably totally not interesting, except for me, as it is a milestones. I’m coming and still into Max since about 20 years and still teaching it.)