I've started working (hacking) on a program but realized i have no idea how to do the next part, so i figured i ought to "seek wisdom" at perlmonks.

So here's the deal:

The program is a curses based drum machine, written in, of course, perl. I'm using the excellent CDK (Curses-DevKit) and have hacked up a pretty slick little matrix interface. The program will pipe it's output to CSound, which will handle the audio part.

Now what happens is you create patterns in a matrix and the program *should* step through it at whatever tempo we are going at, see if a note is going to be played, and if so send a little line to the csound program like: 

i 1 0 2 3 4

[download]
or whatever.

Now this all happens in real time, so i need to have some kind of timer loop that polls the matrix at a regular interval, but doesn't steal all the cycles from the interface.

seems that this is your classic case for a fork with a sleeping child, but my concerns are: will the timing be accurate enough for an audio app ( <3ms or so), and how painful is IPC in perl. i haven't done any IPC programming for quite a while, and would rather avoid it if possible.

is there a magic module that i'm looking for? i looked at Time::HiRes but it didn't seem quite right. (maybe i'm just dumb;-)

In reply to using timers in a music app by dockthepod

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