Schedule action at next beat, bar, measure...

[giohappy]

I'm new to Reaper scripting so forgive the basic question.
Is it possible to schedule an action / routine to be executed at a specific time in the future?

As an example:
1 - click a keyboard shortcut while playing
2 - an action fires at next beat which mutes a certain track

Do I need to loop with defer() and manage the elapsed time by myself?
AFAIK defer() is not very reliable though, since Reaper will queue the callback and it will fire as soon as a free slot is available. Would it be enough to make actions like the example above?

[giohappy]

I think I got it by myself. A script doesn't have any scheduling utility, and the only option (if I'm not wrong) is polling and calculating when the next beat will happen.

I suspect this is not a good use case for a script.
A JSFX (on a utility track) would probably be a better solution. Now I have to understand how to manage keyboard inside a JSFX..

[jrengmusic]

If you have SWS extension installed, you could just use Action Marker.

[giohappy]

@jrengmusic I don't think it's my case. What I want to obatin is run an action at a future point in time but depending on a trigger by the user.
My example should be clear:

- a user clicks a key on the keyboard
- an action is scheduled to be triggered at a certain point in the future (e.g. next bar)

After digging more I see that JSFS is not the right tool, since it's not meant to use Reaper API.
I guess the only solution remains using the defer() approach and calculate trigger things based on the playhead status, tempo, etc.

[Meo-Ada Mespotine]

You can have a look at my Event-Manager-stuff in my Ultraschall-API:
https://mespotin.uber.space/Ultrasch...1_Introduction

This is intended for event-based stuff. All you basically need to do is writing a function, that can find out that a bar has changed from the previous one to the current one and return true in that case.
If you have such a function, you can pass it over to my EventManager and tell it, how to run it and how often to check for it(30times/sec is maximum).

Is takes away the tedious management of defer and even allows you to pause or end the check, if you don't need it.

[giohappy]

Oh, nice. In my case it should be one-off actions, to be run only once. Is

StartActionsOnceDuringTrue=true

the paramater value for addEvent() to use in this case? Does it also deregister the event after the action has fired?

[Meo-Ada Mespotine]

StartActionsOnceDuringTrue=true is right.

It does not deregister it after that directly, only by unregistering it yourself.
But this is a good point, to have single-shot events only triggered once and removed as they aren't needed anymore.
I think I'll try to add that in a later version.

[giohappy]

Cool, it would be really useful. For the moment I will unregister the event before adding a new one afterwards.