[maxmsp] Re: Pattrstorage, active 1/0, and scripting

Some of this is deliberate; the thinking was that your decision to de-activate a particular entry may be more fleeting than the data. We back the data up for safekeeping.

I guess what you want is to be able to store presets without storing the data for every object, or at least some way to remove the data for a particular object, thus removing its 'entry' in the save file.

This doesn't currently exist for pattrstorage, and I'm not sure if or when it will. You could, however, trim your files manually or with a script (Ruby is my weapon of choice here) after they've been created.

Essentially, the hierarchical pattrstorage support (pattrstorage controlling the preset state of other pattrstorage objects) was intended to eliminate precisely this situation, where you need to store thousands of individual values. As you've determined, for whatever reason, to not use this very powerful mechanism, you're probably going to have to find some annoying workarounds for the issues you're seeing.

Jeremy