Bitcrush crashes when receiving a relatively high bitrate

[Maarten Michiels]

Whenever I feed the Bitcrush object a Bitrate of about 11 or higher, the emulator crashes immediately. This can be verified in the patch attached. Left knob adjusts Bitrate, which is posted in the console.

I am using Patchblocks beta v0.3.3 on Windows 7 64bit.

[James Surgenor]

This would be the expected behaviour as the Patchblock is a 10-bit system

[Maarten Michiels]

I tend to believe that simply crashing without giving the user a description of what went wrong should never be expected behavior. Isn't there the possibility of simply limiting the value to 10? And possibly outputting a message in the console?

[James Surgenor]

In this case it's about the programmer ensuring what's happening in the program makes sense? We can't limit every variable you might want to use - that's all up to you, that's the power of it :) If a patch doesn't work, the first thought can't be 'the software must be broken'.

[Maarten Michiels]

Well, I have to say that these kinds of crashes have given me a rather bad first impression of Patchblocks.

I see that you don't want to limit your users' creativity and hold their hand while they create a patch. But it doesn't seem to me that software crashes would yield your users more possibilities for exploration. I really see no reason to just accept, without adjusting it, a value that is 100% sure to crash the entire patch. I would rather expect a scenario like "Hey, why doesn't this Bitcrush do anything if I change its Bitrate? Oh right, 10 bit is the max possible Bitrate anyway".

Then again, we might simply never agree on this.

[James Surgenor]

I completely appreciate what you're saying. The way the software currently works doesn't apply input limits to variables - this has good and bad points, but ultimately means that users must read the Help files, as we would hope they do, and if the Help files don't have enough details, please let us know and we'll get them updated :)