Not really the main point of this thread, but I wanted to bump this aspect of this thread now that fluid.datasetquery~ is getting beefed up. In a lot of examples in the latest alpha (06) there are sections of patches that look as follows:
clear, addrange 0 24, addrange 84 24, transform example11.mfcc example11.mfcc.meanstd
or this:
clear, filter 11 > 0.7, addrange 0 4, transform example11.tmp example11.composite
Where individual columns are being moved around, filtered by, and/or queried, without any (built-in) way to know what’s in what. At every point you need to know what’s in these columns, what range they may be in, etc…
Before, I guess the idea was “flatten everything into a dataset and it doesn’t matter what is what anymore”, but now fluid.dataset~ appears to be a “working” data type where transformations are being applied to it.
So I’m bumping/suggesting a way to label everything in a fluid.dataset~ (with fluid.labelset~ or a variation thereof), which would then hopefully allow things like:
clear, filter loudness > 0.7, addrange timbre.0 timbre.4
So you don’t need to know where in the fluid.dataset~ something is, but only need to what what it is, and can call it accordingly. I guess it gets trickier for ranges, but a subnotation like that (loudness.1, loudness.2, etc…) may be useful?
This would also make everything more robust to changing things since you can add/remove all the descriptors you want, and my second message would still be valid, whereas the index/range messages presume everything being exactly where it was, thus making it very brittle to changes.