The device is a pure observer — it reads the LOM and talks to GameSense and
never looks at a note — so it does not have to sit in the path of anything you
play. But a Max MIDI Effect without midiin -> midiout swallows MIDI instead of
passing it on, so the shipped device routes every note you play through Max's
scheduler on its way to your instrument. Pointless cost for this device.
max/scale-lighting-audio.maxpat is the same patcher as an Audio Effect,
declaring no I/O at all: no midiin/midiout, no plugin~/plugout~. Park it on a
dedicated empty Audio track and it is provably out of every signal path.
The two patchers differ by exactly midiin, midiout and the patchline between
them — @watch 1 and everything else are deliberately left identical on both
sides, so an A/B measures the passthrough and nothing else. Both register the
same GameSense game, so they have to be loaded one at a time; that and a way to
actually measure the difference (compare note onsets across recorded takes, not
the CPU meter) are in the README.
The patcher test now runs over both files, and two new tests pin the
distinction: the MIDI variant must wire midiin to midiout, and the audio variant
must declare none of those four objects — the kind of thing a later edit would
otherwise silently undo.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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