User Guide

Data Types & Signal Flow
Boolean Connectors
There are Boolean equivalents of the Poly, Mono and Stream data types. They are only seen on a few components, most notably the Poly
and Mono comparison components.
The MIDI to Poly module has a Poly Boolean output which shifts from false to true when a note is played and can therefore be used as a
gate signal.
Poly Boolean – multi-channel mask, one mask for each note playing
Mono Boolean – single channel mask, constantly running
Stream Boolean
Poly Int
The Poly Int data type is the integer equivalent of the Poly type. It is used only in the Graph to Poly to allow sample rate indexing of Float
Arrays.
PolyInt – multi channel integer, one channel for each note playing
SSE
If a cpu supports SSE then it has a set of instructions built in that allow mathematical operations to be performed on multiple sets of data at
the same time. FlowBotics Studio makes full use of this when processing stream data. The result is that you can effectively process up to 4
channels at the same time for the same cpu cost as just one.
Mono 4
If you really want to get the best performance out of a Mono section then you need to consider using the Mono4 data type. It’s not always
possible to use this but when you can it makes a huge difference to performance.
Mono sections only have one sound process. Because FlowBotics Studio uses SSE this process could be doing four times the work for the
same cpu cost. To take advantage of this we have the Pack and Unpack components. These allow you to literally pack four mono channels
into one Mono4 stream.
Mono4 – four Mono signals processed as one
Performance
To help you gauge the effect of changes to the stream parts of your schematic we have a cpu meter. This can be found on the right side of
the status bar at the bottom of the application window. The cpu meter is very basic. It only measures cpu performance of the stream
sections, GUI performance is not measured.
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