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I have been experimenting with using the player agent to play a musical phrase from a belcanto script. To my surprise, I got it working reasonably well, however was hoping there is a better way to do it.

I tried to find some kind of pause or wait command, however was not successful and ended up using the "ahem" command. I have no idea what "ahem" actually does, and cannot find it in the wiki. The belcanto format is as follows:
note 20 with velocity 100 for 0.75 second play
ahem
ahem
.
.
note 21 with velocity 77 for 1 second play

I used a fairly large number of ahems, from 24 to 48 per note.

1. What does ahem do? Is it safe to use it like this?
2. Is there a better way to time notes in belcanto?

Since I only have a Pico, Arranger is unfortunately not an option.

Is Workbench required to do this? If not, an example script would be much appreciated.

Brian

Thank you Mark, I look forward very much to trying this out!

I don't think the verb silent is used anywhere keyman.
(or at least i cannot find it in the code, except for in the lexicon)

@bwong, enjoy... btw it might look a bit 'complex' as its creates a 'virtual keygroup' that is large, to make it useable on the pico, but the connection stuff for the arranger is simple enough.
also, Im not quite sure on your planned usage, from the above example, it seem to be programmatic, if this is the case and you dont need a visual add, I think you could probably create the arranger without a keygroup, and program in belcanto.

also, the question could also be, why use belcanto for a phrase?
could you not just record it, and then just trigger the recording from belcanto?

also... if you want to do more 'programatic' stuff, you could do this externally, and just trigger via eigend via midi/osc ... eg. as I've done with Osc Pad for Ableton Live.

anyway, lots of ideas and rather depends what your end goal is.

ah sorry,
I only ever look at 2.0/2.1+ source code. 1.4 is quite a bit different and as I don't use, not worth investigating (for me)

Until I see what is possible with the arranger I will not know where a programmatic rather than recording approach might be useful.

That is a really insightful observation. The real issue with a programmatic approach is that you are then tied to and driven by that framework for the song.

One hybrid (if you just have one thing to program) is to leave an arranger enabled with the metronome off. You can then play it by starting the metronome whenever you want. You just need to be at (or close to) tempo and you need to think about stopping it at the end (particularly if you want to play it again).

mikemilton - Thanks, that is a handy technique.
Technobear - Thanks Mark! Having access to arranger will open up a lot of new possibilities.