Polyphony Using mc.poly~

The poly~ object manages polyphony for multiple instances of a patcher. The poly~ object always copies audio inputs to each patcher instance, and mixes the output of each patcher instance together at the object's outlets.

The mc.poly~ object uses multichannel signals to operate in a more flexible way. A multichannel input to mc.poly~ assigns the audio for each channel to its corresponding patcher instance (poly~ voice). The first audio input channel in the signal is passed to an in~ object within the first patcher instance, the second audio input channel in the signal is passed to an in~ object in the second patcher instance, and so on.

Similarly, the output fed to out~ objects in a patcher inside mc.poly~ is not mixed with the other patchers, it comes directly out to the corresponding channel of a multichannel signal.

Here is a patcher that simply passes audio input arriving at an in~ directly an out~:

Here is a comparison of poly~ and mc.poly~ using simple numbers as input to four instances of this patcher loaded in each object. For the poly~ case, we feed a single-channel signal of 1 to the object and it produces a single-channel output:

Note that the output is 4, representing the sum of all the patchers mixing their inputs together.

For the mc.poly~ case, we will feed in a four-channel multichannel signal consisting of 1 in the first channel and 0 in the other three channels.

In this case, the output multichannel signal is equal to the input multichannel signal.

One use of mc.poly~ would be to load a simple patcher to use as an audio effect operating in parallel on each channel of a multichannel signal. If you want to mix the output of all the effects, you can do that later with mc.mixdown~ or mc.op~.